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The Kingdom of Christ 



A Series of Ten Lectures 






By 



j: William terry 



i. s 



THE SHAKESPEARE PRESS 

114-116 E. 28th SU 

New York 






Copyright, 1915, 
By J. William Tebbt 



m 15 1915 
k!.A406314 



To the memory of 

MY FATHER 

who was a faithful minister of Jesus Christ, 

And to MY MOTHER 

to whom I owe much because of her life of self-sacrificing 

service, 

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface 5 

The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man 7 

The Atonement * 18 

King Christ and His Magna Charta 33 

The Constitution of the Kingdom 47 

The Place of Church, Creed and Law in the Ad- 
vancement of The Kingdom 58 

Christ's Plan of Conquest 80 

The Unfolding Revelation 93 

Prayer 105 

Things of Which We Are Certain 115 

The Victorious Kingdom 129 



PREFACE 

These lectures are not an effort to restate or expound 
any system of theology. They are not technical, being 
written for the lay rather than professional student. 
They are an attempt to put into a language which is free 
from the terminology of the theologian certain truths 
which the author believes to be the fundamental teachings 
of Jesus about His Kingdom. 

There is no attempt to set forth anything new; but 
rather to expound and illustrate in a popular way cer- 
tain phases of the thought of more recent years con- 
cerning these matters which have been dealt with almost 
exclusively in a technical manner. 

The illustrations are not scriptural in themselves, but 
are used in an attempt to make clear certain teachings 
of the Scriptures. It would be unsafe to build into a 
system of theology such phrases as the ''Magna Charta'' 
— or "Constitution of The Kingdom." They are not 
scriptural; but the author believes that they will serve 
well to illustrate some very vital teachings of the 
Master. 

In short, these lectures seek to help some of the laity 
to a better understanding of some of the modern prob- 
lems that concern the spiritual side of the Christian 
fundamentals. 

There have been those, where these lectures have been 
delivered, who have objected that they were weak 
in that they deal too largely with the spiritual inter- 
pretations of the teachings of Jesus, ignoring their 
practical applications, such as the social side of Christ's 
gospel, the Kingdom on earth, etc. We must not for- 
get that the Kingdom of Christ is a spiritual kingdom. 



6 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

The social application of the Gospel is the outgrowth of 
spiritual life. The Kingdom comes to Earth because 
the Kingdom first comes to the Heart. The spiritual is 
first, the practical application its outcome. These lec- 
tures are an effort to deal with first things. 

It is the prayer of the author that this volume may 
help some to a clearer understanding of the purport of 
the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. 



The Kingdom of Christ 

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD AND THE BROTH- 
ERHOOD OF MAN 

I believe in the Fatherhood of God and in the Brother- 
hood of man. 

By the Fatherhood of God I mean that God is the 
Father of all, not only of the righteous but of the un- 
righteous as well. He is the Father of those who be- 
long to the Kingdom of Christ, also of those who know 
nothing of the gospel and of those who know, but 
refuse to hear and answer the gospel's call. If, then, 
God is the Father of all, all men are brothers, not only 
those that are bound by the kinship of a common faith 
but all men, of whatever faith they may be, men of all 
races, the rich and the poor, the learned and the igno- 
rant, the moral and the immoral. 

The statement of the fact of the Fatherhood of God 
and of the Brotherhood of man as a doctrine of theology 
is new. But while the theology of the past has not 
recognized it, we have known it instinctively for a long 
while. Although the church has taught doctrines that 
were, in many instances, essentially contrary to the doc- 
trine of God's universal Fatherhood and the universal 
Brotherhood of men, both those of the pew and the 
pulpit have instinctively felt that to which they had not 
learned to give their intellectual assent. In matters 
of religion, as well as in other branches of life, as we 



8 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

shall discover in a later lecture, this instinctive or ex- 
perimental knowledge is of superior authority to and 
an inevitable forerunner of a definite intellectual recog- 
nition. We are coming speedily to an intellectual accept- 
ance of the fact of the Fatherhood of God and of the 
Brotherhood of man, and the time is not far off when it 
will be an authentic part of the creeds of orthodoxy. 
But it will not be new to the great mass of Christendom, 
for experimentally we have known it for a long time. 

Let us argue from the experimental to the intellectual 
in this matter. 

When a child is born, it either belongs to God or to 
the Devil. The old theologian with his theory of the 
child "conceived and born in sin'' could not consistently 
consider the new-born babe other than a child of the 
devil. It is not to be wondered, therefore, that in the 
first hours of the child's life it was hurried to the altar 
of the church for baptism, that through that ordinance 
it might enter into covenant relations with Christ and 
thereby become an adopted child of God. The old theo- 
logian was consistent with his own theology when he 
supposed Hell to be paved with the bodies of unbaptized 
babies, for if a child does not belong to God when it is 
born then it does belong to the devil. 

I greatly doubt, however, if any mother, no matter 
what her theology may be, can hold her new-born babe 
close to her breast and, feeling the flutter of its little 
heart, really feel that her child is born belonging to the 
devil, only to be adopted into the family of God through 
the provisions of a hard and unnatural atonement. 

Those who are nearest the inner shrine at the time 
of child-birth, when the mother goes so far down into 
the valley to come up again to a joy that she alone can 
understand, when the mysterious glory of new life 



J 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 9 

bound up in this bit of flesh is ushered into the world, 
cannot help but feel that it is a time when God is pecu- 
liarly manifesting Himself. There are none, I am sure, 
who will go out of a birth-chamber feeling that the new 
life that has come into the world belongs to the devil 
until, under some very mechanical and legal provisions 
of the Omnipotent, the child can be adopted into the 
family of God. 

Whatever logical theory we may construct, from a 
purely theological standpoint, will be, in fact, I believe 
always has been, denied by the truer instincts of our 
inner consciousness. Mother and Father, you will not 
admit that your child was, when born, a child of the 
devil. If not yours neither was your neighbor's. 

If, then, the child belongs to God when it is born, 
when does it cease to belong to Him? Is it when the 
child reaches the age when it can choose for itself, 
and then makes a choice against God and Christ's King- 
dom ; or is it when in later years it disobeys the laws of 
God, rejects His love and cuts itself off from Him? 

Let us consider the laws of parenthood. Father and 
Mother, when your children become disobedient and 
refuse to obey parental authority, and you find that you 
can no longer draw them by the great force of parental 
love, when they leave the home roof tree and drift from 
you into the world of evil, do you say, "You are no 
longer a child of mine; I hereby renounce all kinship; 
you are but as a stranger to me''? Not if you are a true 
parent. If by any chance you are so unnatural a father 
or mother as to thus cast off your child, your sin is 
deeper than theirs. 

God is a perfect parent. When your child forsakes 
you, your love still calls out after it, the wayward one, 
your child. For it is always, obedient and loving, or 
sinning and wayward, always your child. 



lo THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

Some one objects that there is a difference between 
the relationships of earthly parents and those of the 
Heavenly Parent. The only difference, of which I know, 
is that the earthly parent's relationship is more or less 
imperfect while the relationships of the Heavenly Parent 
are always perfect. All will agree that the parable of 
The Prodigal Son illustrates the relationship between 
God, as Father, and man, as son. 

In this parable, you will remember that, although 
the youngest son took his heritage, and leaving his 
father's rooftree went into the far country, there to 
spend his all in riotous living, he was all the while his 
father's son. And, if you please, the son that remained 
at home with the father was always his brother. I have 
no doubt but that in the close of this parable the Master 
meant to rebuke unbrotherliness. The parable is not 
only the parable of "The Prodigal Son" but also the 
parable of "The Unbrotherliness of the Elder Brother." 
If the elder brother had possessed the true spirit of 
brotherliness he would have journeyed into the far coun- 
try to find his brother and bring him home. To me, it 
is very clear that in this parable the Master teaches 
that God is the Father of the wayward and erring as 
well as of the loving and obedient, and that the fallen 
brother is our brother in just as true a sense as the obedi- 
ent brother who dwells with us under our Father's home 
roof. 

Moreover, the doctrine that we are not natural chil- 
dren of God, but only heirs by adoption, destroys much 
of the most sacred relationship that could exist between 
God and man, for the relationship of an adopted son 
can never be as perfect as can that of those who are 
natural heirs. 

When I say that God is the Father of all, I do not 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST ii 

mean to say that he deals the same with all of His chil- 
dren. I do not mean that the wayward, on one hand, 
and the loving and faithful on the other, receive from 
Him the same abundance of divine blessing and an 
equal measure of fatherly care. I do not mean to say 
that the gifts of God are bestowed as freely upon the 
unrighteous as they are upon the righteous. The 
younger son could not enjoy the comforts of the 
Father's house while living a fast life in the "far coun- 
try." He had cut himself off from the bounty of his 
father's household; how then could he enjoy the bless- 
ings of his father's wealth? It is so with those who 
cut themselves away from the Heavenly Father's love 
and care. They have refused to take from their Father's 
hand the gift of eternal life and are away from Him, 
lost in the sin of the world. 

Now the Father's family is divided, it is the great 
tragedy, divided into two Kingdoms. First, the King- 
dom which is ruled by the Elder Brother, Jesus Christ, 
which is the Kingdom of righteousness. It is through 
this Kingdom that the obedient ones gain eternal life. 
Then there is the Kingdom whose citizenship is made up 
of the disobedient, of those who refuse to swear al- 
legiance to Christ as King. This is the Kingdom of 
the world. Because those who are citizens in this King- 
dom refuse to crown Christ King of their lives, be- 
cause they refuse the love and obedience they owe God 
as their Father, they cannot enter into the rich joys of 
the Father's bounty nor inherit eternal life. 

Thus we see that, when rightly understood, the fact 
of the universal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood 
of man does not belittle sin nor establish a Universal 
salvation. We have, however, that which, in the under- 
standing of the Divine relationship toward us and our 



12 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

relationship toward one another, will eventually solve 
the world's most difficult problems and go far toward 
bringing all the world into the Kingdom of Christ. 

It is the fact of the universal Fatherhood of God and 
Brotherhood of man that makes possible the missionary 
propaganda. As the world understands these great 
facts better, the missionary fervor will grow. It is dif- 
ficult to understand how we, with the idea that all who 
were not brought into immediate relationship with God 
through covenant relationship with Christ were not 
children of His, could fervently support the missionary 
programme. If the millions of China and Africa, if 
those in far-away India, Korea and the dwellers on the 
Islands of the Sea are not children of God, not our 
brothers, why the passion to reach and save them? If 
they are of some other family than God's family why 
should we disturb them? God is not a proselyter. He 
does not desire to steal from another's household. He 
wants only those w^ho belong to Him. But those of the 
far-away lands are His children. He is their Father. 
They belong to His household ; the black man, the yellow 
man, the red man as well as the white man are children 
of His. Many of them do not know it; they cannot 
enjoy the benefits of such relationship, for they have 
never been told of it, but it is our duty, we who are 
their brothers, to tell them. The passion to tell them 
does not come, in fact, never could come, from a desire 
to proselyte into His family from without. The passion 
does not come to save the stranger, who is lost, but a 
brother. 

A fuller understanding of the Fatherhood of God 
and the Brotherhood of man will deepen within us a 
genuine passion for the souls of those who are round 
about us. If it had not been for the true instinct that 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 13 

taught us experimentally of this Fatherhood and Broth- 
erhood, in spite of the false teachings of the theologians, 
we would never have experienced a true passion for the 
souls of others. 

If the wretched drunkard, the scarlet woman and the 
ruined gambler are strangers, if they are members of 
the household of Satan, why should we have so earnest 
a desire to bring them to a different life? If they are 
children of the devil, let them go. What do we care? 
They are no kin of ours. If the man, whose greed and 
lust for the material blinds him to the things that are 
worth while, is a child of the devil, why should he in- 
terest us? If, because of his greed, he becomes hard 
and vicious, if he steals from the widows and robs the 
orphans, if he oppresses the weak and thereby loses his 
own soul, why should we care? He is no kin of ours, 
he is only a child of the devil. Why should I try to 
save him? I am my brother^s keeper, but God never 
made me keeper of the children of the devil. Ah, but 
this man is not a child of the devil ; he is a child of God 
and, therefore, my brother! 

The drunkard, the woman of the street, and the men 
and the women who are losing their souls because of 
their love of worldliness and lust for things material, 
are all children of God and our brothers and sisters, and 
the bond of kinship gives us a passion for their sal- 
vation. 

It will only be when we understand that God is the 
Father of all mankind, and that all men are brothers, 
that we will be in real earnest about purging the earth of 
its great institutions of vice. Only when we understand 
that the poor creature, who is damned soul and body 
in the brothel, is our sister, will we rise up in our might 
and annihilate the White Slave traffic. Not until we 



14 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

understand that the man who is being wrecked by the 
liquor habit is our brother, will we, in righteous indig- 
nation, wipe the liquor traffic from the earth. We will 
give our best energies out in battle for the protection 
of our own kin, but not for those of another's house- 
hold. 

An understanding of the Universal Brotherhood of 
man will be the only basis for the solution of our eco- 
nomic and sociological difficulties. When the capitalist 
understands that the laboring man is his brother, and 
when the laboring man understands that the capitalist 
is his brother, then the labor warfare will be near an 
end. The capitalist will adjust the many injustices that 
he has perpetrated, and each will live to ser^'e the other; 
for they will no longer be strangers and enemies, but 
kinsmen, brothers. 

When the vision of the Universal Brotherhood has 
become sufficiently clear to us we will be on the high- 
road to universal peace. Nation may war with nation if 
they look upon each other as nations only. Race will 
hate race if all they understand is the fact that they 
are members of different races. Brother, however, will 
much less war with brother. And surely when we com- 
prehend the fact of Universal Brotherhood, Christian na- 
tions will refuse to war, not only with the Christian na- 
tion but with the non-Christian nation as well, for we 
are all brethren. 

The vision of the Universal Brotherhood, when clearly 
understood, will solve the problems that arise from race 
hatred. When we know that the black, the yellow and 
the red man is as much our brother as the white man 
we will forget, in a large degree, the difference in race, 
for such things count but little among brothers. As we 
individually understand more perfectly the truth of the 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 15 

Brotherhood of man, we will discover that the race 
hatred that we have felt, often much against our wills, 
to be a part of our nature, is disappearing, and brotherly 
love springing up in its place. 

All this is not too much to claim for a proper under- 
standing of the fact that God is the Universal Father 
and that all men are brothers, for there is no bond like 
the bond of kinship. There is no greater force than the 
impelling love between parent and child and between 
brother and brother. If a husband turn traitor to his 
wife she can separate herself from him and be a stranger 
to him. She was a stranger to him once, she can be a 
stranger to him again. If a wife is unfaithful to her 
husband he may cut her off and be a stranger to her. 
He was a stranger to her once, he can be a stranger to 
her again. A mother, however, was never a stranger 
to her son, a man was never a stranger to his brother. 
They, therefore, never can be strangers to each other. 
No matter how deep they may sin, no matter how they 
may disregard the demands of the relationship, they 
cannot be strangers for they are kinsmen, and to refuse 
to accept the responsibilities of that kinship is to sin 
very deeply. The fact that our brothers may deny the 
relationship and refuse to be bound by it, will not lessen 
our responsibility in the matter, for we are our brothers' 
keepers and nothing can sever the bonds of kinship. 

The same law holds good in the spiritual relationship. 
God is the Father of all, and must recognize the relation- 
ship toward all mankind. There can be no doubt that 
God is true to the requirements of the divine kinship; 
any failure is always upon our part, God's love is always 
the same. His love for a sinning world was so great 
that He *'gave His only begotten Son" to live and die 
for us. This is the greatest manifestation of love that 



i6 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

God can give to man. God recognizes the bond of par- 
enthood that makes Him the loving Father of all the 
family, obedient and disobedient. 

It is our duty, we who recognize the divine relation- 
ship of God and are citizens of Christ's Kingdom, to 
recognize our bond of kinship with all the world whether 
others recognize the relationship or not. There are 
many nations who have not yet heard our gospel and 
many within the reach of our own churches who know 
nothing of the world's kinship; and there are thousands 
more who know of it but refuse to recognize it. But 
whether they know of it and refuse to recognize it or 
do not know of it we, who know, are bound by the sa- 
cred chords of this kinship and by all of its holy respon- 
sibilities. We are our brothers' keepers, and all men 
are our brothers. 

God speed the day when the great fact of the Uni- 
versal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of man is 
universally understood. Then thousands who are away 
from the Father's house will come back, and many who 
now refuse to hear His call will cry to Him for for- 
giveness. For those who will sin against a God who 
is the Father of the righteous only will repent when they 
know that they are sinning against their own loving 
Father. 

When the Christian folk understand more perfectly 
the truth of this great doctrine with which we are 
dealing, they will take upon themselves sacred responsi- 
bilities in such a way as to bring marvelous things to 
pass. They will rise up to make the most Christlike 
sacrifices to carry the gospel to our brethren in Africa 
and China, Japan, Korea, India and the Isles of the 
Sea. I know that some are making mighty sacrifices to 
that end today, but when the day is come that all Chris- 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 17 

tendom understands that foreign mission work is but 
taking the gospel to those of our own family, the vision 
of the old hymn will be fulfilled, for they shall ''seek 
the Savior's blessing, a nation in a day." 

We shall, in the day when we fully comprehend 
the true scope of our Father's family, see the great so- 
cial problems moving toward a speedy solution, for our 
ideal, as Christians, will be more and more true service, 
because it will be service to our own kinsmen. We will 
then see the church wielding a truly great influence over 
the great masses that today they cannot reach, largely 
because they (the church) refuse to consider the masses 
outside as belonging to their family. We will put forth 
such efforts as we have not even approached in the past 
to wipe out the curses that drag our brothers down. 
Nation will no longer war with nation, and race hatred 
will die out in the hearts of man. For we are kinsmen, 
and the spirit of loving service is the only right rela- 
tionship between brother and brother. 

All this will not come to pass in a day. Many will re- 
fuse to recognize this kinship and many who do recog- 
nize it will refuse to be controlled by it, but ultimately 
love will prevail. Therefore, God haste the day when 
we shall fully understand the truth of the Universal 
Fatherland of God and Brotherhood of man. 



THE ATONEMENT 

Marvelous as is our ability to express great truths 
through the medium of language, there are certain facts 
that transcend the limits of rhetoric. No language can 
be builded that will convey them. We can name the 
facts, and comprehend something of them in our experi- 
ence, but we cannot build an explanation of them into 
words. Some things can be expressed in words, others 
only in life. 

There are some truths that we can understand with- 
out great difficulty and others that it takes a lifetime of 
study to comprehend. There are yet other truths that 
students have struggled to fathom for many generations 
and we do not yet comprehend them; but we shall mas- 
ter them some time. There are other truths so in the 
realm of the infinite that it takes the study of eternity 
to grasp them; we battle to discover them and are 
amazed as their wonders unfold to us. And while we 
comprehend them better from year to year and from 
generation to generation, there is always more to know 
about them. Their ultimate solution transcends the 
comprehension of the finite. 

The central fact of the Christian religion, The Atone- 
ment, is a fact so great that no language can be builded 
that can explain it. We can only know it as it unfolds 
in our experience; we can only find it in life. Taken 
altogether, it is a fact that so far transcends our finite 
grasp that after we have comprehended all of it that 
we are capable of grasping after all these centuries of 
trying to understand, we must say, 'The half has never 
yet been told.'' 

Christ had a message that He could not deliver in 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 19 

words, for words could not express it, so He delivered 
it by a life of sacrifice, and by His death upon the cross. 
This message is of such great power that it will bring 
a sinful and alienated world out of their sins and back 
to God. It is a message that will always be the greatest 
fact in the world, and yet eternity alone will tell it all. 

The theologian has foolishly been trying to do that 
which Christ never attempted. He has been trying to 
explain the necessity of Christ's life and death, and to 
build into a creed this explanation, or theory of the 
atonement. If Christ could not put it into words how 
can we expect to do it? I recognize the fact that we 
can have no truly Christian theology other than that based 
upon the fact of the atonement. But why not recog- 
nize the fact that the atonement transcends language, 
that it is known only in experience and in its entirety 
can be comprehended only in eternity. 

Every attempt that has been made to explain the fact 
of the atonement, every theory of the atonement that has 
been builded has been so much false work that has 
kept the seeker away from the great fact itself. When- 
ever we think that we understand the fact of the atone- 
ment, we stop that far short of the truth and are satis- 
fied with infinitely less than the whole truth. If we are 
satisfied with a theological statement of the atonement, 
we lose the most vital part of Christ's message to us. 

It is true that every theory of the atonement contains 
an element of truth. But a part truth is sometimes very 
harmful. Let us consider in as brief and simple a way 
as possible certain theories of the atonement that have 
been most generally accepted by the theologians of the 
diflferent ages, and see where they fall short, that we 
may clear away the false work and catch a clearer vision 
of the great fact itself. 



20 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

It is almost certain that the early church had no 
theory of the atonement. The language the Apostles 
used to express the fact of the atonement was often in 
the figure of the Hebrew idea of a literal blood atone- 
ment. But this language was used only to symbolize a 
vital fact. The Hebrew's literal blood sacrificial system 
was in a large part responsible for the Jews losing their 
vision of a spiritual religion and drifting into a religion 
of form only. 

In the beginning, the forms of temple worship were 
given to a race of children that could be taught only by 
pictures. Therefore, they must have pictures to teach 
them of the heinousness of sin and of the willingness 
of God to forgive. However, after a time they fell in 
the same pit that has been the snare in the religious life 
of so many since, they took the symbols in place of that 
which they symbolized, the form for the fact. Thus, to 
the Jew, forgiveness of sin became possible through a 
blood sacrifice rather than true heart repentance and the 
mercy of Jehovah. Sin lost its terror, for it was so 
easily remitted. 

Literal blood sacrifice has never been really essential 
for the forgiveness of sin, in fact, its only value was 
that of a symbol. Isaiah understood this and expressed 
it in Isaiah, fifty-eighth chapter. Micah states it clearly 
in the sixth chapter of his prophecy : 

"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and 
bow myself before the high God? Shall I come 
before him with burnt oflFerings, with calves of a 
year old ? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands 
of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? 
Shall I give my first born for my transgression, the 
fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 

"He hath shewed thee, Oh man, what is good; 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 21 

and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do 

justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 

thy God?" 

The Jews held so tenaciously to the form that they lost 
sight of the spirit and their religion grew to be one 
entirely of form. Notwithstanding this fact, theologians 
have attempted to drag much of the Hebrew theology 
over into the Christian. In the face of the Master's 
teaching to the contrary they have tried to put new wine 
into old bottles. So that, to a greater or less degree, the 
basis upon which most of the theories of the atonement 
have been builded, is that Christ became the sacrifice for 
all sin that there need no longer be a sacrific offered for 
each individual sin; that He fulfilled the old law, and 
was so great a sacrifice that the world needs no other 
sacrifice. 

Practically the first formulated theory of the atone- 
ment was what we call ''the trick theory.'' It was that 
God had contracted with the devil as follows : The souls 
of those who sinned were to belong to the devil while 
the souls of those who were without sin were to belong 
to God. However, it developed that all men would sin, 
therefore, according to the agreement the devil would 
claim every soul. When many called upon God for for- 
giveness, and He, in His loving kindness, desired to 
grant their plea, He was unable to do so because of the 
agreement with the devil. To circumvent this agree- 
ment God made a treaty with the devil that He (God) 
should purchase back the souls of all who repented of 
their sins by giving the devil His son Jesus Christ. 

Therefore, God sent His Son to earth to die upon the 
cross and then to descend into Hell and thus pay the 
price for the repentant souls, and at the same time 
satisfy the demands of the devil. When the Satanic 



22, THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

majesty agreed to this, he had thought that he could keep 
Christ when He descended into Hell, but because God 
had more power than the devil. Hell could not hold 
Jesus. He, therefore, ''Rose again from the dead, and 
ascended into Heaven." God having known that the 
devil could not keep Christ, had tricked him (the devil) 
to free Himself (God) from the first agreement. Thus, 
according to this theory, God tricked the devil. 

It is very clear to us now that such a theory comes 
Yery far from the truth. We know that the character 
of God is such that it would be impossible for Him to 
deal so unethically even with the devil. It would be 
entirely superfluous to take time here to disprove the 
''trick theory." We can easily see that it failed in the 
attempt to explain the atonement. 

The next theory is known as the "satisfaction theory " 
It is, in substance, something like this: God was angry 
with men because of their sins, "Repenting that He made 
man." And in His anger would have cut them off from 
Him because of their sins. However, Christ, because of 
His love for the world, came to earth that He might 
live and die to propitiate the anger of God, and return- 
ing to Heaven be our advocate, standing before the 
Father's throne, showing His wounded hand and 
pierced side; and thus reconciling an angry God to a 
sinful world. 

There are some who still believe this theory. It can 
be supported, as can any of the other theories, for that 
matter, by taking a verse of scripture, here and there 
and using them apart from their setting. Those who 
have believed the "satisfaction theory" overlooked the 
fact that there was such a truth as the one proclaimed 
in the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of John: 
"For God so loved (not hated) the world that He gave 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 23 

His only begotten Son." Not a loving Son coming to 
appease an angry God, but a loving God giving His own 
Son. 

It would be hard to love a God who was angry with 
men and would forgive them only because of the peti- 
tions of a Son who claimed the right to be heard be- 
cause of the great sacrifice He had made. The ''sacri- 
ficial theory'' of the atonement is a slander against the 
character of God. 

The theory that is most generally accepted today is 
known as the ''governmental, or substitution theory/' 
Briefly, it is this: God made a law that the soul that 
sinned should surely die. Later when man had sinned 
and then cried to Him for forgiveness, God was willing 
to save the sinner from death, but He was bound by 
His own law and could not. 

To satisfy the demands of His own law and uphold 
His government, and at the same time save the repent- 
ing sinner, He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to be sin in 
our stead, and to die for our sins. He (Christ) was 
punished, the innocent for the guilty. 

There are several objections to be raised to this theory. 

In the first place, we will hardly say that God did not 
know that men would sin and afterward repent of their 
sins before He made the law that the sinner should die. 
Now, if He did know, why did He bind Himself by 
such a law? Or in making the law why did He not 
make some provision for the release of the soul that re- 
pented of its sins? This objection is answered, that if 
He had made such a provision we would not have under- 
stood the terribleness of sin. This objection will not 
hold, for surely the law that those who sinned and did 
not repent would die, would be as effective as the law 
that all who sinned would die, when it is understood 



24 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

that there is a provision through the atonement whereby 
the repentant escape. Moreover, the fact is that the 
soul that sins does die and must be born again before 
it lives. 

Again, I fail to understand how Christ can become 
sin in our stead, or how His physical death upon the 
cross will satisfy the law that demands spiritual death 
as the penalty for sin. 

Then, vicarious punishment is neither just nor neces- 
sary. God could not be a true Father if He punished 
the innocent for the guilty nor can I understand how 
His government makes it necessary. I have an illustra- 
tion that I believe to be perfectly fair : 

A certain father had two sons. To these sons he made 
a law that the son who was disobedient should surely 
be punished. The younger son disobeyed, but afterward 
repented and plead for forgiveness. The father de- 
clared his willingness to forgive but said : "I cannot for- 
give, for my parental government must be upheld, I 
have said that the son who was disobedient must suffer 
punishment, therefore, to uphold my authority I must 
punish you.'' 

But the elder son, who has always been obedient, 
pleads : 

"Father, punish me in his stead.'* 

So the father, to uphold his parental authority, pun- 
ishes the innocent son for the disobedience of the guilty 
one. This would be wrong: first, because parental gov- 
ernment would not demand it. Secondly, it would be 
unjust that the innocent (even when willing) should be 
punished for the guilty. 

Dr. Reginald Campbell is right when he says: "No- 
where in the world is there such a thing as vicarious 
punishment, but the law of nature is vicarious suf- 
fering:." 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 25 

The innocent mother suffers for the guilty son, the 
innocent wife for the guilty husband, but they are not 
punished in their stead. 

While the ''governmental theory'' contains more ele- 
ments of truth than the other theories that we have dis- 
cussed it is far short of containing the true explanation 
of the atonement. 

There are other theories of the atonement than these 
that we have considered, but they are all more or less 
outgrowths of them and are fully as inadequate to ex- 
plain the great fact. 

I have said that the fact of the atonement, because of 
its transcending greatness, could not be builded into 
any creed or explained by any theological theory. I 
will, therefore, refrain from making the blunder of try- 
ing to build a theory of my own. It is my purpose to 
consider briefly the great fact itself and some of its 
effects upon the generations since Christ was crucified, 
and its work in the hearts of men today; that perhaps 
we may understand a little more of what the atonement 
means in human history as the central fact of the Chris- 
tian faith, and perhaps find in it some new message for 
ourselves. 

It has always been the great task of God to reveal 
Himself to men for only as men know God, do they 
have life. It has been God's supreme desire that men 
might understand His love for them, for only through 
an understanding of His love will men be drawn to Him. 

Since it is the supreme task of the Almighty to reveal 
Himself to men, that they might have life through 
knowing Him and growing into His likeness, He has 
put forth His best efforts to make men know Him. As 
we will see in the seventh lecture of this series, there is 
to be seen everywhere and in all ages the record of this 



26 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

effort of God to reveal Himself. This record is most 
clearly seen on the pages of Holy writ. 

The author of the book of Hebrews says : 

''God, who at sundry times and in divers manners 
spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets/' 

We find all through the Old Testament how God at- 
tempted to reveal Himself to the world through the 
medium of the prophets, and in many ways he suc- 
ceeded. Yet there was much concerning God that 
the prophets could not understand, and in many things 
God failed in His effort to reveal Himself to and 
through them. The prophets could not understand all, 
for so much was beyond their comprehension. These 
facts concerning God were infinite facts. How then 
could the prophets who were finite understand these 
things which were infinite when they were spoken to 
them in the language of the infinite? Therefore, in a 
large degree, God failed in His efforts to reveal Him- 
self through the prophets, since they were finite and He, 
the infinite, must speak to them in the language of the 
infinite. 

God could not reveal Himself directly to the hearts 
of men for the same reason that He could not reveal 
Himself to the prophets, because the finite cannot under- 
stand the language of the infinite. God, therefore, 
found it necessary to combine the infinite and the finite 
as the only way to put His message in a form that could 
be understood by man. 

He clothed His infinite nature in flesh, and came to 
earth to live and die as a man, that by this means He 
might reveal Himself to men. John so well expressed 
it in the opening words of his gospel when he says: 
'The word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and 
we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 27 

of the Father/' The author of the book of Hebrews 
states the same fact, continuing after the words quoted 
before, that God who spoke in times past to the fathers 
by the prophets, ''hath in these last days spoken unto us 
by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things '' 

Thus, we see that, in Christ, God accomplished His 
supreme task of revealing Himself to the world. That 
which He could not reveal directly to the hearts of men, 
nor yet through prophets. He succeeded in revealing in 
the life and death of Christ. 

I have this simple illustration : 

I was at one time employed as a telegraph operator. 
The telegraph instrument responds much more to the 
human touch than those who are not familiar with it can 
understand. I think I can tell, with no other knowledge 
than that which the sounder of the telegraph affords, 
whether the operator working on the wire is a man or 
woman, whether they are young or old, and if I work 
with them for a little time I will know whether they are 
of a kindly or an irritable disposition. In fact, with no 
other acquaintance than that which I can form over the 
telegraph wire, I come to the place where I feel that I 
know the other operator quite well. 

Suppose that after some years of this sort of wire 
acquaintance this operator should some day walk into 
my office and introduce himself, and we should shake 
hands and have a few minutes of personal conversation, 
I would know that operator better after those few 
minutes of personal conversation after I had touched 
his hand and looked into his face than I could know 
him after years of wire acquaintance. 

For some years I carried on a correspondence with 
a man that I had never met. Through that correspond- 
ence and through reading some of his writings I felt 



28 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

that I had a personal acquaintance with him. One day 
I had occasion to ride a few miles with that man on the 
train and I discovered that in even so short an associa- 
tion I could know him in a way that I could not after 
years of long-distance acquaintanceship. 

Through the prophets, who knew much of God, 
through nature, where God writes of Himself in a 
myriad of ways we may learn of Him and have a long 
distance acquaintance with Him. But the only way that 
we can really know Him is in the personal contact; and 
the way that God found to come into personal contact 
with men so that they could understand, was to make 
the Word flesh and dwell on earth as a man. Thus, in 
Jesus Christ, God reveals Himself to man. 

By far the major part of God's revelation is the reve- 
lation of His love, for it is by love that He draws a 
sinful and alien world back to Himself. It is by His 
love that He inspires obedience and self-sacrificing ser- 
vice from those who call Him Father. It is not by the 
power nor the wisdom of God that a sinful world will 
be made righteous, and an alien world will be brought 
back to Him, it is not by the power of His might that 
men will come to love Him but rather by the power of 
His love. 

The world will be drawn to God only as the world 
understands God's love for it. You and I are drawn 
to Him only as we comprehend somewhat of His love 
for us. For no matter how great God's love may be, 
it means nothing to those whom He loves until they 
know of the love. So God's great eflfort in revealing 
Himself is to teach men of His love for them. 

You will remember the old Scotchman in ''Beside the 
Bonnie Briar Bush," who had a great love for his daugh- 
ter, but did not know how to show it. And she, poor 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 29 

motherless child, felt that she was alone in the world, 
robbed of a mother and knowing nothing of the love of 
her father. For what is the world without love? And 
because of her lonesomeness and her misunderstanding 
of her father she ran away to London. Then, when 
the father realized how he had failed in manifesting his 
love and a good woman of the parish had persuaded 
him to reveal to his daughter his love for her by sending 
for her to come home, she came back to him, drawn by 
the love that she had never known of before. How glad 
indeed was the poor bruised heart of the child when, 
returning, she found that other manifestation of her 
father's love, the light in the window. The father had 
always loved the daughter, but had lost her because he had 
failed in revealing his love. And it was in the revela- 
tion of the love that he had always felt that he not only 
brought her back, but gained that which he had never 
possessed before, the fullness of his daughter's love. 
And the daughter had gained that which she needed 
the most, a loving father. As it was the manifestation 
of the father's love that brought her back and gave her 
her father, so is it the manifestation of the love of God 
that will bring a world back to Himself and give to 
it a loving Father. 

God has not been constantly saying to the world in 
the language of men, '*I love you! I love you!" If 
He had so desired. He could have written on the 
tables of stone with the decalogue, *T love the world." 
He might have written it in the clouds in the sky ]>y 
day and in letters of fire in the sky by night. The 
Bible might contain on every page the statement (^f 
God to men, *T love you." But had He done this, men 
would not have believed it. They would have said, 
"How do we know?" It is an easy matter to say 'T 



30 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

love you'' when it is not true. Then, again, God might 
not have meant the same thing w^hen He said '*love'' 
that v^e mean when we say love. The bare statement 
of the fact that we love is never enough. The statement 
from God that He loved the world would not have 
been enough. 

We know that a mother loves her child, not because 
she says that she does, but because through constant 
sacrifice in service, because of her keen suffering for 
the child's wrongs and because of her constant care 
for it when it suffers, because of her supreme faith 
when all others have turned against her child, because 
of these things we know that a mother loves her child. 

We know of the love of God for us because of the 
sacrifice on the cross. Christ might have come to 
earth and delivered the same verbal message that He 
did deliver, perform the same miracles that He per- 
formed, and after this if He had died a natural death 
He would have meant no more to the world than a 
great teacher. But because, coupled with the sacri- 
ficial service of His life, we have the supreme sacrifice 
of the cross, we find in Him God ; we find in Him the 
highest revelation of God ; we understand through the 
cross, as we could understand in no other way, some- 
thing of what the love of God for a lost world truly is. 
And seeing God's love thus manifested we cannot say 
no to His appeal, we cannot turn away when He calls. 
A lost world could say no to a God whose chief attri- 
bute is power or wisdom, but understanding the cross 
they cannot say no to a God whose chief attribute is 
so supreme a love. Thus by the impelling power of 
love are we drawn to Him. In this we understand 
what the Master meant when He said, ''And I, if I be 
lifted up from the earth will draw all men unto me." 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 31 

Just why it is so I do not attempt to say; why it 
could not have been otherwise I can only partly under- 
stand; what all it means to the world no tongue nor 
pen can ever tell. Sufficient that it is so. We know 
that the cross has dominated the world's history for 
the past two thousand years. The cross has been the 
greatest power for uplift that the world has ever 
known. When we look upon the cross and listen for 
the message that it has for us, we find that which 
unspeakably transcends the highest ideals found else- 
where in all the world. If we walk close with God 
we will find that it was the cross that drew us there. 
We find that when we are away from Him that it is 
the cross that calls us back. The world without the 
cross is a world without our God of Love. 

When we sufifer we know that He understands, 
when we are tempted we know that He was tempted, 
when we are bruised and broken we know that He 
cares, for He went through the valley of the shadow. 
We can find in Him that which we can find nowhere 
else. It is all made real to us, I cannot understand 
just how, but I know that it is so; it is all made real 
to us through the cross. 

The cross is the central fact of the Christian faith. 
Rob the Christian of the cross and you take from him 
his vision, his Savior, and His loving father. Indeed 
you leave him very little that is worth while. But you 
cannot rob the Christian of the cross; he will not let 
it go, to him it is light, it is life. That which was the 
darkest hour of history, when the sun was darkened, 
when the earth trembled, when the dead came from 
their graves, when the veil of the temple was rent in 
twain, when the Son of God died, has become the 



32 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

great light of a sinful world and is the dawn of eternal 
life for many souls that were lost. 

''When I survey the wondrous Cross 
On which the Prince of Glory died, 

My richest gain I count but loss, 
And pour contempt on all my pride. 

Were the whole realm of nature mine, 
That were a present far too small; 

Love so amazing, so divine. 

Demands my soul, my life, my all." 



KING CHRIST AND HIS MAGNA CHARTA 

The Jew's great hope was the expected coming of 
the Messiah to establish His Messianic Kingdom. 
This was right, and as the Almighty intended that it 
should be. The failure of the Jews to accept the 
Messiah and to seek citizenship in His Kingdom when 
He came, was due to the fact that their vision was not 
broad enough to comprehend the extent of the King- 
dom over which He would reign. 

The Jews did not reject Christ because He brought 
to them less than they had expected, but because He 
brought to them more than they looked for. It has 
never been that we have rejected our prophets because 
they came to us with less than we expected, but we 
have refused to receive them because their message has 
exceeded our vision. The Jews looked forward to a 
Messianic Kingdom and then rejected Christ because 
His Kingdom was mightier than the one for which 
they looked. 

They looked for a leader who would not only free 
the Jewish temporal Kingdom from the bondage of 
Rome, but would also become so forceful a leader as 
to subdue the whole world and, by force, proselyte 
them into the Jewish Kingdom. 

We have many reasons to believe that Christ, had He 
been willing to lay aside His greater mission, could have 
fulfilled the Jews' expectation. There are those who 
hold to the belief that Christ had a right to the Jewish 
throne, that He was the Heir Proper of the royal 
line of The House of David. It is claimed that this is 
the reason that Herod was afraid of Him and at- 
tempted His life when He was a babe at Bethlehem. 



34 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

It is argued that Herod would not have dared to 
attempt the life of one whom He thought to be the 
expected Messiah, that, therefore, his jealousy was for 
one whom he knew had a right to the temporal throne 
of the Jew. 

Whether this be true or not, several events in the 
life of the Master show us that if He had given His 
consent that He could have been proclaimed King by 
the Jewish masses. The political conditions through- 
out the world at that time were such that it is not a 
wild fancy to imagine, that one who was able to stir 
the religious zeal of the Hebrew people into a frenzy, a 
people so docile when acting from other motives and 
so mighty when stirred by a religious impulse, and 
one who could at the same time command the military 
respect of certain other peoples who were enemies of 
Rome but lacked the leadership for a revolt, could 
literally have conquered the world and established a 
temporal kingdom stronger than any that the world has 
ever known. There is little doubt that Christ could have 
fulfilled the Jews' Messianic hope if He had been willing 
to lay aside the mission of establishing the Greater 
Kingdom. 

Never once, however, did the Master swerve from 
His conquest to establish the true Heavenly Kingdom. 
They tried to make Him an earthly King and He 
refused. They tried to heap upon Him the honors 
due a temporal ruler and He turned from them. Yet 
He told them that He was a King; and when they 
asked Him about His kingdom He told them that it 
was '^within them.'' Because they did not understand 
how much greater His kingdom was than that which 
they had expected, they refused to receive Him. 

Because the Jew refused to receive Christ did not 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 35 

mean that His kingdom failed. In face of all opposi- 
tion He fulfilled His mission on earth. He laid the 
foundations of His Kingdom in the two years of His 
ministry on earth and then went into the spiritual 
realm to rule over His spiritual Kingdom. The vital fact 
to understand concerning this Kingdom is the fact that 
it is a spiritual kingdom, 

I say that in His two years of ministry here He laid 
the foundations of His spiritual kingdom. This He 
accomplished by delivering to the world His Magna 
Gharta or Declaration of Independence from certain 
things that enslaved, liberating the intellects, the con- 
science and the souls of men from the things that were 
holding them in bondage, that all who would might be 
free. 

He gave the world not only His Magna Charta, but 
also a constitution for His new Kingdom, that once 
freed from the things which had held them in bondage 
men might enjoy a citizenship in a Kingdom of free 
men. 

Let us give considerations to the Magna Charta. 

In the first place. He declared His Kingdom to be 
Universal. The Jews believed that the Kingdom of 
God was bound up within the Jewish nation. They 
believed that entrance to the Kingdom could be gained 
only through the gates of Judaism, and that one be- 
came acceptable to God only after he was circumcised 
and had conformed to the laws of Moses and to the 
traditions of the elders. Ghrist declared that the 
Kingdom was not confined to the limits of the Jewish 
Hierarchy, but embraced the Gentile as well as the 
Jew, and that a Greek or Samaritan could be in favor 
with God and a citizen of the Kingdom without first 
becoming a Jew. 



36 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

We find the declaration of the Universality of the 
Kingdom in the record of the Master's dealings with 
the Syrophenician woman, as recorded in the seventh 
chapter of Mark's gospel. It doubtless has appeared to 
many that Jesus called the woman a dog. No explana- 
tion that can be imagined would justify this. A proper 
understanding, however, will make it evident that it 
must have been for the disciples a very forceful lesson 
of the scope of the Kingdom. The disciples, in common 
with all Jews, considered the Greeks as dogs. So that 
when the woman came near the Master calling upon Him 
to cast the devil from her daughter that the disciples 
must have rebuked her saying, "Stand back, you Greek 
dog!" The Master, seeing that the time was ripe to 
illustrate a great truth, said to the woman: 

"Let the children first be filled, for it is not meet to 
take the children's bread and cast it unto the dogs." 

Then, after the woman had proven her faith, (and 
Jesus required that both Jew and Gentile prove their 
faith) Jesus cast the unclean spirits from the woman's 
daughter. Now this healing was the bread, and the 
Master had declared that it was not meet to give the 
children's bread to the dogs. By the act of healing her 
daughter Jesus gave the woman bread, thus proving 
to the disciples and all those who hear of this event 
that the woman was not a dog but a child. He taught 
that the bread that He had to give was as much for 
the Greek woman of Syrophenicia as for the circum- 
cised Jew, that the Kingdom was as accessible to the 
Gentile as it was to the Jew. 

The fact of the universal scope of the Kingdom, and 
certain other points of the Magna Charta, are clearly 
illustrated in the manner that Jesus dealt with the 
Samaritan woman at Jacob's well near Sychar. To 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 37 

understand this event we must understand three 
things: first, that she was a Samaritan; second, a 
woman, and, in the third place, that she was a harlot. 

*'Now, the Jews have no dealings with the Samari- 
tans/' The Jew considered that the Samaritan had no 
favor with the Almighty since they worshipped Him 
after a fashion of their own, having their own temple, 
worshipping in their own holy mount (which was 
Gerizim and not Sinai), and refusing to hold sacred the 
ordinances of the Jew. The Jew, therefore, consid- 
ered them blasphemers and unworthy of any associa- 
tion whatsoever. Therefore, the woman could not be 
other than greatly surprised when Christ, a Jew, spoke 
to her, a Samaritan. 

Then the Jew considered it improper to give a 
woman public recognition. In face of all that has been 
said to the contrary, one cannot read the Old Testa- 
ment without discovering that the Hebrew had no 
very high ideals concerning the dignity of woman- 
hood. A Jew would no more think of greeting a 
woman in public than a Mohammedan will to-day. So 
we may well believe that this woman was surprised at 
this public greeting. That a Jew should take notice 
of a Samaritan was amazing; but that a Jew should 
publicly address a Samaritan woman was well nigh 
unbelievable. Moreover, she was a harlot, and the 
religious Jew was extremely careful to draw his gar- 
ments about him that he might escape contamination 
from contact with those who were sinful. There was 
a very clear distinction with the Jews between those 
who were religious (after the fashion of the Pharisee) 
and those who were admittedly sinners ; a distinction 
made clear by the fact that the churchman had no 
dealings with the publicans and sinners. In this con- 



38 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

nection you will remember that there was very bitter 
criticism of Christ because He consented to eat with 
Publicans. Therefore, to the Pharisee, the religious 
Jew, it would seem a thing impossible that a Rabbi, 
that He who claimed to be the Messiah, should pub- 
licly address a harlot. 

It is, therefore, not to be wondered that the Samaritan 
woman was greatly surprised that Jesus asked her for 
water, and the disciples must have been greatly amazed 
when they returned to find the Master ofifering this 
Samaritan harlot the water of everlasting life, which, 
as they believed, belonged only to the Jew. In the fact 
that the Master did offer this woman the water of ever- 
lasting life we find illustrated the salient points of the 
Magna Charta. 

In the fact that she was a Samaritan we find that 
Jesus again teaches the Universality of His Kingdom. 
In it we find the truth that His Kingdom is free from 
the bonds of any ecclesiasticism. If the Kingdom of 
Jehovah had been confined to the Jewish nation, if the 
Holy Mount had been Sinai alone, and the temple of the 
living God only at Jerusalem, and if man could come 
into the Kingdom only by the observance of the ordin- 
ances of Moses, it was to be so no longer, for here was 
Christ offering citizenship in His Kingdom to a Samari- 
tan without demanding that she first become a Jew. She 
could as easily have within her this ''well of water 
springing up to everlasting life" as if she had conformed 
to all of the Jewish ordinances. 

Here we have it — the Jews with their holy mount at 
Sinai ; the Samaritans with their holy Mt. Gerizim ; the 
Jews with their temple at Jerusalem; the Samaritans 
with their temple on Mt. Gerizim — both received the 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 39 

offer of eternal life from Jesus, and the benefits to be 
derived from citizenship in His Kingdom were as much 
for the one as for the other. We see that it is not a 
matter of being a part of an ecclesiasticism ; it is not 
what men dogmatically believe. Christ taught that the 
Kingdom of Christ was not a matter of church organiza- 
tion, nor yet a matter of theology or creed. As it was 
not essential then it is not essential now ; it is not the 
organization to which one belongs nor the creed to 
which one gives assent but, as we shall see in the next 
lecture, a matter of inner life. 

There is much said in these days concerning the 
emancipation of womanhood. Did it ever occur to you 
that the only real emancipator that woman has ever 
known was Jesus Christ? If we were to consider the 
status of women as found under every condition in 
every age, we should find that they have been held as 
free and equal with men only in the Christian era and 
in lands that are Christian, where the Protestant gospel 
is preached without hindrance. It will be entirely un- 
necessary for me to stop long to point out the fact that 
women were considered very far beneath men by all 
ancient religions. The Hebrew religion, which was by 
far the superior of all the ancient religions, gave 
very little consideration to the worth of a woman; a 
perusal of the Old Testament will prove this to be a 
fact. No Jew considered his mother or his wife to be 
his equal. When a male child was born in a Jewish 
home there was rejoicing; when the child was a girl 
there was keen disappointment. The Jewish women, 
however, held a position that was much higher than the 
women of any of the other peoples of that day. 

Consider the standing of women in pagan lands to- 
day. Under Confucianism, in China we had the bound 



40 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

foot. The wife is but the plaything of the husband. 
Conditions are growing better in China only under the 
influence of Christianity. Under the influence of the 
Koran and the rule of the crescent we have the Turkish 
Harem and a moral condition unspeakable. The home 
is violated, and all womanhood debased in the polygamist 
theories and practices of Mormonism of our own country. 

Some one suggests that it is education that will give 
woman her rightful place and free us from the super- 
stitions that have always made her a slave to man. A 
prominent archaeologist declares that in his research he 
had discovered certain writings coming from Greece and 
Rome, in the palmiest days of art and philosophy in those 
countries, (days when these branches of education were 
at their best) so that if high education meant high ideals 
of womanhood then that should have been a time when 
woman came into her own. But these passages, he 
declared, are too vile for publication, and that he would 
not dare to utter them from the platform. To the Greek 
and the Roman a woman was not more than a plaything 
for men, she was in no real sense free. The nation's 
ideals concerning her were very low. Education of itself 
never has and never can spell emancipation for woman- 
hood. 

It is clear that women have never been free except 
where the gospel of Jesus Christ spreads its influence. 
Jesus Christ alone was the emancipator of womanhood. 
It is in the Christian lands that the name of mother 
stands above all names on earth. It is in the Christian 
religion that we find the demand for purity and for a 
system of ethics that will destroy the double standard. 
It is in the Christian lands that we realize the powerful 
influence of woman, and, instead of making her a moral 
slave, we give to her the highest of honors. To the 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 41 

Christian there are no names more sacred than wife and 
mother, and there is no earthly influence held more 
sacred than that of the pure woman. 

The woman that does not, in return for the emancipa- 
tion that is hers through Jesus Christ, yield to Him her 
life, is in no way appreciative of the great freedom that 
is hers because of this Magna Charta of Christ's declar- 
ing freedom from the bonds of lust and of superstition 

The greatest article of the Magna Charta is illustrated 
in the fact that Jesus offered the water of Ufe to the 
woman who was a harlot. Jesus Christ came to free 
men from the very worst of all slavery — sin. The re- 
ligion of the Jew appealed much to the man who boasted 
of his own righteousness. While it is true that many 
of the characters of the Old Testament, like David, had 
been great sinners and repented of their sins, while it 
is true that certain of the prophets, notably Isaiah, had 
conceived the fact that God invited sinners back to Him- 
self, we find that the major message of the Old Testa- 
ment makes its appeal to the righteous man. The re- 
ligion of the Pharisee had in it very little for the man 
who recognized himself to be a sinner. The Pharisee 
was always willing to cast the sinner into outer dark- 
ness. But no one can read the four gospels without 
realizing that Christ's major message was for the sinner. 
Since it is *'the sick and not the whole that need a physi- 
cian," He, the great Physician, came to heal the sick 
and to set free the sinner. As we study His life work 
we grow more and more to understand that His call 
was constantly to the wayward one. We learn that He 
came "to call sinners not the righteous to repentance." 

As we look upon the work of the Gospel of Jesus 
through the centuries since He was on earth, we under- 
stand how truly it liberates from the power of sin. The 



42 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

history of the Christian rehgion is that of ''the sinner 
saved by grace." Men and nations have been lifted from 
the stagnation and death of sin to the power of a Hfe 
of righteousness. Men and nations that have been 
bound by the shackles of sin have, as they felt the 
influence and power of the Gospel of Christ and have 
submitted themselves to it, found their shackles broken, 
and they who were once slaves are now free. China, 
which has for centuries been enslaved by a myriad of 
vices, a nation of resources, of favorable geographical 
location, of wealth, a nation of millions of inhabitants, a 
nation w^hich might well be among the foremost nations 
of the earth, is stupified, enslaved by the sodden influ- 
ences of such a vice as the opium traffic. Confucianism 
and Buddhism have manifested that they did not have 
the power tO; break the shackles of such sin. 

In these last years since the Christian missionary 
has gone into China, we find that the nation is throwing 
off the shackles of her vices; and as the Christian in- 
fluence penetrates into her darkness, little by little China 
is freed from its enslaving sins and we shall see her 
become a real world force taking her place among the 
foremost nations of the earth. I might illustrate the 
same with other nations that today are coming swiftly 
to the front because, by the freeing power of the gospel 
of Jesus Christ, they are breaking away from the 
slavery of superstition and vice. 

One of the foremost external evidences of the reality 
of the Christian religion is the fact that no man can say 
that he has not seen men, long slaves of sin, become 
free men by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, 
men who were slaves of the liquor habit, slaves to lusts 
of the flesh, slaves to lust for gold, men who did not 
live one moment of joy, but lived rather lives of misery, 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 43 

of no service to themselves or the world because of their 
enslaving vices. We have seen such men as these be- 
come Christians and those who were once slaves go free. 
We have seen the man who was a drunkard become 
strong as a sober man, him who was a libertine, master 
of himself in his purity, and him who was a slave to 
miserliness become free in the joy of service to his fel- 
lowmen. And it is all because of the power of the gos- 
pel of Jesus Christ which frees men from the bondage 
of sin. 

There is one other form of slavery from which we are 
freed by the gospel of Christ that it will be well to 
mention. Christ came to free men from the despair that 
comes from sorrow. He did not come to free us from 
sorrow, for sorrow has a divine mission to those who 
are citizens of His Kingdom. But to the man who does 
not have within himself the eternal hope that is the 
rich possession of the Christian, for the man who does 
not have a vision that reaches far beyond the things 
of the present, for the man who does not have a vision 
of the victorious and eternal Kingdom, sorrow cannot 
bring other than bitter despair. Suffering can have no 
meaning which is of value to him whose life and hope 
are bound up in the present, and whose wealth consists 
of the temporal. 

But to the Christian — well, the Master said, ''Blessed 
are they that mourn." Although the problem of sorrow 
is yet a very deep mystery to us, we know that somehow, 
to those who live close to God and know the divine 
secrets of the Kingdom of Christ, sorrow brings a rich 
experience that could come no other way. We find that 
to the one whose life is saturated with the spirit of the 
Christ there is no other thing that so develops and re- 
fines the character as the influence of sorrow. 



44 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

Necessarily, for the man whose all is here and now, 
whose wealth is in the things that are temporal, whose 
ambition is for power, and whose joys come to him 
through the sensations of the flesh and the pride of life, 
sorrow will rob of the things that seem worth while and 
leave nothing in their place. And to such a one after 
sorrow has come, life will become empty and he will be-; 
come bitter in his despair. 

To the one who lives not alone in the present but 
whose life is broad in the full expanse of Christ's King- 
dom, and whose wealth consists of the things that are 
not temporal but eternal, to one who seeks a life more 
like the life of the Master, sorrow will bring that which 
is of infinite value. Although it may wound deeply, and 
although its pain be severe, in the end we will find that 
through it we have become richer. The author of He- 
brews was right when he said "whom the Lord loveth 
He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He re- 

ceiveth Now no chastening for the present 

seemeth joyous but grievous: nevertheless afterward it 
yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them 
that are exercised thereby." 

Again, Paul is right when he says in Romans, 'Tor 
we know that all things work together for good to them 
that love the Lord." 

We know that the life of Christ means much to us 
because of His sufferings. Take from the gospels the 
record of the suffering of Christ, and what have you 
left? Some excellent ethics without the force of the 
divine life of suffering behind them. The force of the 
divine character of Christ came in the fact that He suf- 
fered. Paul and Steven loom up as great characters to 
us because they suffered. We love Peter more because 
of the story of the death that he died. Take from the 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 45 

Christian gospel the message of suffering and you will 
find that you have robbed it of its most vital force. 

Thus we see that to the man who has not the hope 
that those who are citizens of the Kingdom of Christ 
have sorrow can only be a robber and can bring nothing 
but despair; but to the Christian it gives a broader and 
fuller life. Christ, in His Magna Charta, freed us from 
the bondage of the despair of sorrow. 

Jesus Christ gave to the world His Magna Charta 
that all who would fulfill His demands for citizenship in 
the Kingdom (demands that will be set forth in the 
next lecture) should be free; first, from bondage to 
ecclesiasticism and creeds. Not that the Master con- 
demned ecclesiastical organizations and creeds, for He 
did not; but He taught that no organization was large 
enough to embrace all the Kingdom, that the Kingdom 
was so extensive in its scope that it could be bound only 
by the limits of infinity. He taught that no creed could 
infallibly state all the truth concerning the Kingdom. 
No man may say, ''Lo, here is the Kingdom within the 
confines of this organization, here and here only. And 
Lo, here is the truth concerning the Kingdom in this 
creed, stated here and nowhere else." While the ecclesi- 
astical organization and theology and the church creed 
have their legitimate place and functions, the Kingdom 
of Christ is bigger than all of them, and, therefore, can- 
not be limited by any of them. 

Jesus came to set men free from the bondage of super- 
stition, for in the train of the Gospel of Jesus Christ 
comes civilization, comes education and all that makes 
for the general uplift of society, such as was impossible 
under the superstitions which are a part of other re- 
ligions. This fact has been illustrated in the liberation 
of womanhood through the influence of the Gospel. 



46 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

Jesus declared that all who would become citizens of 
His Kingdom should be free from the enslaving power 
of sin. 

Through Christ we find freedom from the despair of 
sorrow. For in the Gospel of Christ and in the King« 
dom of Christ is the assurance of ultimate victory and 
of eternal Hfe. 

Christ came to earth bringing freedom, freedom in its 
broadest and truest sense. In the Kingdom of Christ 
all men are freemen. 



THE CONSTITUTION OF THE KINGDOM 

The Master's Magna Charta or Declaration of Inde» 
pendence offers freedom only to those who are citizens 
of The Kingdom. In the Magna Charta those things 
which enslave are swept away that we might be free to 
enter upon the new life as citizens of The Kingdom. 
Christ came not only to free us from bondage, but He 
came also to establish a Kingdom of free-men. In this 
lecture we are to consider the constitution of this 
Kingdom. 

First let us consider what the constitution demands 
of one that one may become a citizen of The Kingdom. 
It cannot demand membership in an organization, for 
we have learned that The Kingdom is not confined 
within any organization. To be a citizen of the King- 
dom of Jehovah the Hebrew believed that one must 
be a part of the Jewish Hierarchy. In the Christian 
era there have been many who have believed that to 
gain citizenship in Christ's Kingdom one must come 
in through the doors of a certain church organization, 
or by the observance of some ordinance such as bap- 
tism. There are certain church organizations that 
now contend that the Kingdom on earth is limited to 
their organization, and that none can be citizens in 
The Kingdom without being members of that church. 
However, we understand now, as never before, that 
Jesus did not make the requirement for citizenship in 
His Kingdom the vows of any church and that we do 
not come into the Kingdom by submitting to any 
ordinance. 

We can see that if church membership makes us 
citizens of The Kingdom that there are some very 



48 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

unworthy folk who are citizens, and some who are 
very worthy who have not attained this citizenship 
because of their failure to take upon themselves the 
vows of a church. 

It cannot be the ordinances of the church that are 
the chief requirement for citizenship in The Kingdom, 
for many who are at heart disloyal to Christ, and thor- 
oughly unworthy of citizenship in His Kingdom, faith- 
fully observe the ordinances. The Protestant churches 
recognize only two ordinances, baptism and the Sacra- 
ment of the Lord's Supper. All, I think, will agree 
that these ordinances are symbols of spiritual realities. 
Baptism is but the "outward sign of inward purity,'' 
without the inward purity baptism is of no value. The 
Master said to His disciples on that last night with 
them, when He gave them the bread and the cup that 
were to represent His broken body and His shed blood, 
'*Do this as oft as you shall drink it in remembrance 
of me.'' In this we see the significance of the ordi- 
nance that we do it in remembrance of Him, of His 
death and of His passion, to inspire a real inner devo- 
tion. The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is of re- 
ligious value only as it stimulates the spiritual life. 

This with what was said in the last lecture will 
make it clear that it is not by any outward form 
that we may enter The Kingdom. One may take upon 
himself the vows of a country, he may swear allegiance 
to the ruler and declare his willingness to abide by the 
nation's laws, and at the same time be the most de- 
based of traitors at heart. But because those before 
whom he takes his oath of loyalty cannot know the 
depths of a man's inner consciousness they must accept 
the formal declaration of allegiance as sufficient to 
secure citizenship. It is not so in the Kingdom of 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 49 

Christ, for one may declare loyalty at the altar of the 
church and thereby gain admittance to the member- 
ship of the church, but if he be disloyal at heart he 
cannot gain citizenship in the Kingdom. 

The prime requisite for citizenship in Christ's King- 
dom is absolute allegiance to the King. The demand 
is that the kingdom of our lives shall actually be sur- 
rendered to King Christ. Not only formally, for there 
may or may not be an observance of a certain form 
when the surrender is made, but the act of surrender 
must be like our worship *'in spirit and in truth.'' 

One day, as Jesus walked by the side of the sea, He 
discovered Simon and Andrew his brother mending 
their nets, and their nets were all that they possessed, 
for afterward in speaking of it Peter said that they had 
left all to follow the Master. When Jesus saw these 
two fishermen mending their nets He called to them, 
"Come ye after me, and I will make ye to become 
fishers of men." "And straightway they forsook their 
nets" (their all) "and followed Him." 

A little farther along the shore the Master came 
upon James and John, the sons of Zebedee. They 
possessed not only nets but also a ship, and the Master 
called to them, as He had called to Andrew and Simon, 
and they left not only their nets but also their ship and 
their father. They possessed a little more than Simon 
and Andrew, and Jesus demanded that they leave all 
if they would follow Him. That is what He demands 
of us if we would become citizens in His Kingdom, 
that we surrender all and follow Him. Probably not in 
just the same manner that He demanded of these first 
disciples. He probably does not demand that we for- 
sake all that we have ; but He does demand that we 
surrender all that we have to His control that it be 
used in His service. 



50 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

There came after Jesus, at one time, a great multi- 
tude, and some of then were desirous, no doubt, of 
becoming His followers. To them He said, *Tf any 
man come to me, and hate not his father and mother 
and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea 
and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Wc 
understand that Jesus did not mean hatred as we 
understand hatred. He meant, rather, that to be His 
disciple one must give Him (Christ) absolutely the 
first place in one's life ; that our loyalty to Jesus Christ 
must be before all else; every affection, every ambition, 
every whit of our lives must be under His control. 

The prime requisite for citizenship in Christ's King- 
dom is that we surrender the Kingdom of our lives to 
Christ, that in them He may rule without rival. 

Christ was not a law-giver. Moses was the law- 
giver, and Sinai the mount of the law. Jesus Christ 
gave to the world an eternal principle which is to be 
the foundation for all right law and holy life for all 
time. On the Mount of the Beatitudes He taught us of 
the ethics which are founded upon this eternal principle. 
He gave but one commandment and we need but that 
one, for it is broad enough to include all others. It 
is, "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye 
love one another even as I have loved you, and that 
ye also love one another." 

The Law of the Kingdom of Christ is the Law of Love. 

The laws of the Kingdom are not the stern "Thou 
shalt" and ''Thou shalt not," such laws as our legis- 
lators write on our statute books to restrain those that 
are lawless at heart from committing violent deeds. 
They are not such laws as Moses gave to the children 
of Israel because of their inexperience and lack of self- 
control. Such laws as these may control men's actions 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 51 

and are the only kind of laws that can be made for a 
temporal government, for man cannot deal with that 
which lies deeper than the outward conduct. The 
laws of an earthly kingdom may say, ''Thou shalt not 
kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit 
adultery''; and a temporal government may punish the 
man who kills, or steals, or is immoral, but they cannot 
control the hatred, or the covetousness, or the lusts of 
men's hearts. Only God can deal with the heart. 

Christ's Kingdom is "within you," it is spiritual, its 
laws are, therefore, spiritual laws. They are higher 
than the ''Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not," for they 
are laws that control the spiritual life. This does not 
mean, as some have supposed, that these spiritual laws 
are entirely divorced from the rules of conduct. The 
inner life is the source that controls the outer life. The 
inspiration of conduct, whether right or wrong, comes 
from the heart. The Master said, "Out of the heart 
proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornica- 
tions, thefts, false witnesses, blasphemies." 

If, therefore, a man's heart be right, his conduct will 
be right, and he will not need the restraint of temporal 
laws. 

This one spiritual law, which is the substance of the 
law of the constitution of Christ's Kingdom, the law of 
love, is so all-embracing in its scope that those who 
obey its mandate will always have the right spirit life, 
and will, therefore, be guiltless of committing the overt 
act of the criminal. For the overt act has its birth in 
the heart, and the heart that conforms to the divine law 
of love cannot give birth to "murders, adulteries, for- 
nications, thefts, false witnesses, and blasphemies." 

There is much more than a passive goodness that 
will be the outgrowth of conforming to the law of love. 



52 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

The man who is obedient to the demands of the con- 
stitution of The Kingdom will not only refrain from 
committing these overt crimes, but he will live so 
actively virtuous that we will find him not only one 
who refrains from doing evil but one who constantly 
does good. 

These facts are perfectly illustrated in the Sermon 
on the Mount. The constitution of the Kingdom being 
one of spirit rather than of letter could not be builded 
like the constitution of a temporal government, a con- 
stitution that can deal with each specific case, that in 
this case thus and thus is permitted, and in that case 
so and so is prohibited, that there are certain things 
that one must do and certain other things that one 
must not do. Such a constitution, at best, can cover 
but a limited field and could never meet the demands 
of the changing order of society and, at the same time, 
be sufficient to meet the demands of a spiritual King- 
dom that is eternal. 

As the temporal order changes we must change our 
governments and their laws to meet the demands of 
the changing conditions. But the constitution of 
Christ's Kingdom is broad enough to meet the de- 
mands of every condition of society and be the founda- 
tion of every law demanding righteousness. We shall 
see more of how this works out when we deal with the 
subject of law in the next lecture. What I am now 
attempting to say is, that in the Sermon on the Mount 
we do not find a legally constructed constitution, for a 
spiritual constitution does not have a legal form. We 
find that in this sermon the Master is illustrating how 
the law of love will work in the hearts and lives of 
men. The code of ethics that it must inspire, the line 
of moral conduct that will be the working out of this 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 53 

law, the positive virtues that will be so large a part of 
men's lives when they have accepted this Law of Love 
as the Law of The Kingdom in their hearts, all this 
Jesus illustrates in the Sermon on the Mount. 

It is true that Christ said that He had not come to 
destroy the law of the prophets but to fulfill them. We 
understand by that, however, that the end of the old 
was come and that the law of the prophets for the 
Jewish Kingdom had fulfilled its day and was to be 
superseded by the new. The old constitution of the 
letter passes away and the new constitution of the spirit 
comes to take its place. Sinai furnished the constitution 
for the old, the world's greatest legal structure, but no 
legal form is sufficient for the constitution of the 
spiritual Kingdom. So we should no longer look back 
to Sinai, the Mount of the Law, but rather look to the 
Mount of the Beatitudes, The Mount of the Spirit. 

Let us study the Sermon on the Mount that we may 
see how Jesus builds the new above the old; the law 
of the spirit of love above the law of the letter. 

He says : 

*'Ye have heard that it hath been said of them of the 
old time, Thou shalt not kill ; and whosoever shall kill 
shall be in danger of the judgment.'' 

This was the old law. 

"But I say unto you that whosoever is angry with 
his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the 
Judgment: and whosoever shall say unto his brother 
'Raca' shall be in dano;-er of the council ; but whoso- 
ever shall say, Thou fool shall be in danger of Hell 
fire." 

By this passage I understand the Master to mean, 
the old law said "Thou shalt not kill," the new law 
restrains a man from murder not by the fear of judg- 



54 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

ment, but because anger is contrary to love, and the 
more angry one becomes the less he loves. One vio- 
lates the law of love by being angry without a cause. 
If one loves he will not be angry, if he is not angry 
he will not kill. 

Again Jesus said: 

"Ye have heard that it hath been said of them of the 
old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery.'' 

Such was the old law. 

^'But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a 
Avoman to lust after her hath committed adultery with 
her already in his heart.'' 

Under the reign of the old law one might not commit 
the overt immoral act for fear of the consequence of 
breaking the law, but the adultery might still be in the 
heart. The new law leaves no way by which a man if 
he obey the law of the Kingdom, may desire in his heart 
to wrong a woman. For a man cannot "look on a woman 
to lust after her" while his life is controlled by the law 
of love. If love has, therefore, driven out lust, the man 
will neither sin by thought nor by act. We, thus, see 
that the law of the new Kingdom is superior to the law 
of the old. 

Again: 

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an 
eye and a tooth for a tooth." For such was the old law. 

But this is not in accord with the new law of love. 
It could not be that we could love one another as Christ 
loved us, and at the same time obey this old law of re- 
taliation. Again the Master shows us that the new law 
is superior to the old. 

"But I say unto you resist not evil." 

Non-resistance rather than retaliation will be the 
outcome of observing the law of the new Kingdom. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 55 

In the other two cases mentioned (that of the command 
against murder and that against adultery) obedience to 
the new law would compel obedience to the old law; in 
this case, however, the new law inspires a course of 
conduct which is contrary and superior to that com- 
manded by the old law. So the Master illustrates more 
fully than in the other instances just how the new law 
would work out. 

''But whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek 
turn ye the other to him also.'' 

''And if any man sue thee at the law and take away 
thy coat give him thy cloak also." 

"And whosoever shall compel thee to go with him a 
mile go with him twain." 

"Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that 
would borrow of thee turn not thou away." 

In all this we find that the conduct which is born 
of the new spiritual constitution is of eminently higher 
order than that which could possibly be enforced from 
the letter of any law. There could be no code of laws 
that could compel a man to refuse to resist evil. From 
a legal standpoint a man could hardly be compelled to 
lend to the borrower. It would be a parodox to say that 
we could have a law forcing a man to do more for his 
enemy than his enemy could require of him. Yet we 
will admit that the man who does not retaliate, who 
does not resist evil, who does more for his enemy than* 
is required of him is a man of greater worth to the 
world than the man who obeys the mandate of the old 
law of "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." 
Where the old law fell short, where the letter could not 
reach, the new law of the spirit accomplishes the high- 
est and best. 

The Master further enlarges on this point : 



56 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor and hate thine enemy/' 

Obviously it would be impossible to enforce a statu- 
tory law that men must love their enemies. If it had 
been a law of the decalogue it could not have been en- 
forced, for it requires more than law to make it pos- 
sible for a man to love his enemies. But the man who 
is a citizen of Christ's Kingdom and is controlled by the 
law of love will find that without any commandment, 
he will be constrained to do as the Master urged: 

*'But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them 
that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray 
for them that despitefuUy use you and persecute you/' 

One cannot well help seeing that both the outward 
and inward life that come as an outgrowth of the law 
of the new constitution are in every way superior to that 
engendered by the old law. 

There are many other illustrations of these points 
in this wonderful sermon of the Master's. I cannot 
treat them here, but those who are searching to know 
more of His Kingdom on earth will do well to make a 
life-time study of the Sermon on the Mount. 

We must not think that the specific examples with 
which Christ deals in the Sermon on the Mount are a 
full code of laws to control the conduct nor a complete 
ethical code. That which one should do when smitten 
on the cheek, or sued at the law, or when compelled to 
show the road to strangers are not the only things that 
Jesus wants that we should deal with in a manner con- 
trary to the old law of retaliation; "An eye for an eye 
or a tooth for a tooth." "Murder and adultery are by 
no means the only things that the Master would have 
controlled by an inner motive. Giving alms and saying 
prayers are not the only things that Jesus would have 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 57 

us do inspired by the spirit. Christ did not legislate for 
a specific course of conduct. He was not a law-giver 
after the manner of Moses. In this great sermon He 
illustrates to us how incorporating into our lives that 
which is the principle of the constitution of the new 
Kingdom, love will produce in our lives that which is 
the very highest both in conduct and spiritual life. 

The constitution of The Kingdom requires as the 
prime requisite for citizenship that we surrender the 
kingdom of our hearts to Christ and that in our lives 
we crown Him King. The law of the Kingdom is the 
law of love, a law superior to all other. 

There are homes where there seem to be little or no 
natural affection manifested. The children are well- 
behaved, and in other ways the home seems to be well 
ordered. The rule of those at the head of the home is 
firm and their mandates are obeyed. But these homes 
lacked that which is so essential to the true home, and 
for this reason they were not such homes as we would 
like to call our own. Again there are homes where you 
constantly feel that the ruling passion of every member 
of that home is love. Their conduct is not ordered by 
the demands of a well-ordered home or the commands 
of those who are at the head of the household, but rather 
by a kindly consideration of one for the other; it seems 
that in these homes every member lives to serve every 
other member. And some way these homes seemed 
superior, as homes, to those controlled by rule rather 
than love. In such homes we seldom hear the "Thou 
shalt'' and 'Thou shalt not.'' It is not necessary, for 
love rules there, and the rule of love is best. 

It is even so in the Kingfdom of Christ. 



THE PLACE OF CHURCH, CREED AND LAW IN 
THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE KINGDOM 

When I say that the Kingdom of Christ is not con- 
fined to any ecclesiasticism, I do not mean that the 
church is not a divine and very necessary institution. 
The fact that the belief in this or that creed is not the 
essential requirement for citizenship in The Kingdom 
by no means implies that creeds are unnecessary By 
the declaration that Christ was not a law-giver I, by no 
means, mean to insinuate that a Christian is in any de- 
gree released from the responsibility of a strict observ- 
ance of all the moral laws. 

You will notice, however, in giving the subject of this 
lecture, I have not said the place of church, creed and 
law in the Kingdom, but, in the advancement of the 
Kingdom, they are things temporal and, therefore, can- 
not organically be a part of the spiritual. Although they 
be divinely planned and ordered of God, the church and 
creeds and moral law are structures created by men. 
But while they are neither The Kingdom nor part of 
The Kingdom they are very necessary for the advance- 
ment of The Kingdom; they are divinely planned in- 
struments to be used for the promotion of The King- 
dom on earth. 

While the Master taught that The Kingdom was not 
bound either within the Jewish Hierarchy, or any other 
ecclesiasticism, and while He taught that both Jew and 
Gentile might be citizens. He did not teach that either 
the Jewish Hierarchy or any other ecclesiasticism were 
either useless or essentially evil. Those who claim to- 
day that, because Christ did not found an organic 
church, there should be no church, have altogether mis- 
interpreted the teachings of Jesus and misunderstood the 
function of the church. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 59 

We cannot work in a world of temporal things with- 
out using the instruments of temporality. The forms of 
our thought, the activities of our lives are on the plaile 
of the temporal; we are very largely limited by the 
things that are temporal. The things that have to do 
with our lives that transcend the temporal come and 
are interpreted to us very largely in the terms of the 
temporal. It is by ''the foolishness of preaching'' that 
men learn of The Kingdom and are taught the thirtgs 
that inspire them to seek its citizenship. Paul said to 
Titus, that God ''hath in dues times manifested His word 
through preaching.'' And again Paul, in his letter to 
the Romans, writes, "How then shall they call on Him 
whom they have not believed? and how shall they be- 
lieve in Him of whom they have not heard? and how 
shall they hear without a preacher?" 

Preaching is a thing that is temporal. It is not a 
spiritual function, but a temporal interpretation of 
things spiritual; it brings men knowledge of The King- 
dom, and the message of the cross, thus creating within 
them the desire to become citizens of The Kingdom. 
Preaching is, therefore, an instrument to be used for the 
promotion of The Kingdom. This helps to illustrate the 
contention that the church is a necessary instrument of 
The Kingdom, for preaching is an important function 
of the church. 

Where there is a genuine spiritual life within, it will 
manifest itself in some form of outward activity. If one 
has spiritual life it will be evidenced in the temporal 
life. Giving food to the hungry, and clothes to the 
naked, being a "father to the fatherless and a husband 
to the widows" does not make one a citizen of The 
Kingdom. One may do these Christlike things and fail 
in "keeping themselves unspotted from the world," or 



6o THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

fail in full surrender to Christ as the King of their lives, 
and thereby fall short of the requirements for citizen- 
ship. But one cannot be a citizen of Christ's Kingdom 
without feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked, with- 
out being a ''father to the fatherless and a husband to 
the widows/' Where there is the inner life there will 
be the impulse that will inspire the outer activity. 

It is, therefore, necessary that we have some kind of 
a temporal organization through which we can perform 
these duties. It was for this specific purpose that the 
church, as an ecclesiastical organization, was first estab- 
lished. Those who say that the church was founded on 
the day of Pentecost are in a degree correct, but it was 
not until later that there was anything of a formal or- 
ganization that might be called an ecclesiasticism. There 
was an organization when the disciples had all things 
in common, but as all like organizations it proved a 
failure. The first record that we have of any successful 
organization was w^hen the Apostles discovered that 
complaint was made by the Grecian Jews that the He- 
brews were neglecting their widows. It was then that 
the Apostles called a meeting of the disciples and or- 
ganized the first board of deacons, for the purpose of 
caring for the needy widows. Thus the first board of 
the new church was organized that the church might be 
''a husband to the widows.'' 

From the time of the organizing of this board of 
deacons we find that the church has added such machin- 
ery as was needed to promote the affairs of the King- 
dom on earth. It is needful, that the Kingdom of God 
may advance, that the things that are temporal be given 
careful attention, because it is largely through the ave- 
nues of these things that God reaches men and inspires 
them to lay hold on the things that transcend the tem- 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 6i 

poral. Let us consider certain facts that will make the 
truth of this contention apparent. 

We give expression to, and stimulate our worship 
through forms. We must recognize the fact that forms 
are not worship, that the saying of prayers is not pray- 
ing, that the singing of praises is not praising. We 
should understand that we cannot attain a state of heart 
purity by symbolizing it in the ordinance of baptism. 
Partaking of the sacrament of The Lord's Supper ''in 
remembrance of His death and passion'' is not neces- 
sarily remembering. But, on the other hand, we may 
find expression for our prayers in the saying of them, 
and in our praises by singing ; we may show to the world 
that we are taking upon ourselves citizenship in The 
Kingdom by being baptized; and we may inspire a 
memory that will enthuse us for great consecration and 
service through the communion service. While the wor- 
ship of God must be ''in spirit and in truth," we must 
have the forms of worship to promote and inspire the 
worship itself. 

To be worthy citizens of The Kingdom we must know 
much of spiritual things. It is, therefore, very essential 
that we shall be educated along spiritual lines. To live 
our religion before the world we must have an under- 
standing of the laws of moral conduct, for those who 
are good citizens of the Heavenly Kingdom will also be 
good citizens of the earthly kingdoms. If our lives are 
right within, our conduct must conform. We must, 
therefore, be educated along lines of the moral and 
ethical requirements of the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

It is very largely through human instrumentalities that 
the Master plans to bring the world to Himself. It is 
God's plan that the world shall be evangelized by the 
CI istian people, carrying the message of the cross to 



62 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

those who have not heard it. It is by the "f ooHshness of 
preaching/' it is by those of His Kingdom telling those 
who are not, that Christ's gospel shall eventually be 
known throughout the world. 

The world's social conditions must be made better by 
the constant application of the principles of the ethics 
of Jesus. That is, by putting into practice in the affairs 
of this life the Master's spirit of love. We pray that 
'Thy Kingdom come, and thy will be done in earth as 
it is in Heaven," and this prayer will only be answered 
when constant application of the spirit of the Christ is 
made to the temporal affairs of life. Thus, when we 
put the spirit of love into practice in civic affairs, the 
outcome will be a practical civic righteousness; it will 
mean a fight against the saloon, and the white slave 
traffic, a battle for clean government and a demand for 
economic justice in the affairs of labor. It is in this way 
that His Kingdom will come to earth. 

The church, as a body of the citizens of Christ's King- 
dom, is the instrument through which these things can 
be accomplished, a band of citizens of Christ's Kingdom 
uniting their efforts to carry forward the temporal end 
of the programme of The Kingdom. These, in their 
organization, express their worship through the forms 
of worship of their church, they stimulate the devotional 
life through their services of praise and worship, they 
observe in some form the ordinances that they may 
express through them to the world something of their 
inner life. 

From the preachers and teachers of the church, from 
the school, the forum and the pulpits of the church, this 
body of citizens of The Kingdom is educated in things 
spiritual and in the morals and ethics of temporal life 
that are the product of the spiritual Hfe. Through the 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 63 

educational avenues of the church we learn of God and 
His will for us and of His demands of us. We learn 
in what form the spirit of love is best practically mani- 
fested in the practical affairs of life. 

That all may hear the gospel it is imperative that we 
have an organization whose propaganda will be to at- 
tend to the spreading of the gospel throughout all the 
earth. We must have preachers and missionaries who 
will spend themselves in the labor of carrying the gospel 
to those who have not heard it. All of the world's 
evangelization will not be brought about through the 
labors of the preachers and missionaries, but that the 
whole body of the church may do their part intelligently 
they must have instruction from those who are experts 
in practical methods, etc. We, as citizens of Christ's 
Kingdom, organize to commission and send men out as 
preachers, as teachers and as evangelists. For this rea- 
son an ecclesiastical organization is necessary, that the 
gospel may be preached, and that the world may be 
evangelized. 

The church is an organization to assist in making a 
practical application of the principles of the gospel. It 
is not only an organization through which we may re- 
ceive instruction in the methods of applying the gospel, 
but as an organic institution, the church is an instrument 
to be used in making the practical application. Tlie 
church has been a great power in the past, and must be 
a still greater power in the future, in making for clean 
government. The church is the institution that will 
eventually destroy the saloon and the white slave traffic ; 
the church must become a great force in demanding 
social justice. The work of the first board of deacons 
was to minister to the poor; and from that day the 
world's only efficient philanthropies have been either un- 



64 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

der the immediate direction, or a direct outgrowth of the 
Christian church. The church should be an organization 
for administering practical charities. 

The church, as machinery for the promotion of Christ's 
Kingdom, should be constructed in such a way as to 
be most efficient in accomplishing the end that it has 
to accomplish. The form and construction of the ma- 
chinery should always be such, as nearly as it may, that 
it can competently meet the demands for service made 
by each successive generation in the advancing Kingdom. 
It is not essential what form the ecclesiastical organiza- 
tion takes as long as it is such as to accomplish its di- 
vinely ordained tasks. There is no such thing as ecclesi- 
astical machinery, the plan of which was divinely or- 
dained and delivered to the apostles and never to be 
changed. The plan of church government that was 
effective in the early church (whatever that plan was) 
cannot be eflfective under the newer and changed struc- 
ture of society. In the changing order of society, com- 
merce, and governments of the world, the church ma- 
chinery must change to meet the demands of the chang- 
ing order. Therefore, a form of church government, a 
piece of ecclesiastical machinery that was entirely effi- 
cient in accomplishing its task in the time of our 
fathers may be able to accomplish little or nothing now. 
It is, therefore, our duty to so change the machinery as 
to meet the present demands. 

The forms of worship that helped men to God a hun- 
dred years ago are in many cases meaningless forms 
today. There is no divinely planned order or form of 
worship. Since it is not the form but the spirit of wor- 
ship that is pleasing to God, any form that will inspire 
and express the spirit of worship will, without doubt, 
receive the approbation of the Almighty. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 65 

That form which will stimulate and express the wor- 
ship of some will be without value to others, and the 
form of church government that is effective in serving 
the Kingdom in some places and with a certain type of 
people is absolutely useless in other localities and for a 
different class of folk. It would, then, be unwise that 
all church government should be the same, or that all 
men should use the same form in their worship of God. 
For instance, it is not necessary that the same form be 
used by all in administering the sacraments. The quar- 
rels that have arisen concerning the mode of adminis- 
tering baptism and the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper 
have been absolutely uncalled for. It is not a question 
of mode but one of spirit. 

The disputes concerning the orders of the clergy, the 
methods of ordinations, the quarrel concerning Apostolic 
Succession and all like discussions are but a waste of 
energy and entirely aside from the point. The clergy 
are no more than a part of the church machinery, they 
are an order of the church and not of The Kingdom, for 
in The Kingdom all who truly serve are priests of God, 
there is no division here between the lay member and 
the clergy. The ordination of the clergy is nothing more 
than the church commissioning that man to perform cer- 
tain distinct functions in connection with its work. The 
only divine demand as to form and organization of the 
church is that it shall be such as to efficiently accomplish 
those things that the Master desires. 

We should not retain, as a part of the church machin- 
ery, that which is old and useless simply because it is 
old. If it has become useless we should cast it aside and 
have some new that will be equal to the demands. If, 
on the other hand, it is old but still serviceable, we should 
not cast it off for no other reason than that it is old. The 



66 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

only justification for the church or any part of ecclesias- 
tical machinery is that it is now building up the King- 
dom of Christ. 

We must not forget that the church is only machin- 
ery and, therefore, no matter how excellent a piece of 
machinery, it will not run without power, and the power 
is not in the completeness or strength of its organiza- 
tion. The power that will run this machine is not tem- 
poral but spiritual, it is generated from the spiritual 
power-house of God. If the church as an organism is 
composed of those who are citizens of The Kingdom, 
those who have the power of God within, it should be 
a highly effective institution. If, however, the church 
is made up largely of members who know little or 
nothing of this inner Kingdom, no matter how perfect 
the organization is, that church will fail. The important 
thing after all, then, is that we be citizens of The 
Kingdom. 

CREED 

There is no virtue in either believing or disbelieving 
the points of any creed other than as far as they affect 
our lives and our faith. There are certain points of 
every creed that are so positively non-essential, when 
considered by their effect upon vital spiritual Ufe, that 
it must be apparent to any seeker after truth that to our 
soul life it will not make one hair-breadth of difference 
what we believe concerning these things. Then there 
are articles in most creeds that are vital and essential. 
It is said that if a man does not believe right, he cannot 
be right, and this is true, in as far as the essentially 
fundamental things are concerned. The important 
question then is : How can we distinguish between the 
things that are essential and those that are not? My 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 67 

personal conclusions in this matter cannot be binding 
on others. This being true I see no reason why the 
conclusions that others reach concerning the things that 
are fundamentals shall be authoritative for me. Nor 
am I willing that the decisions of a church council, gen- 
eral conference, synod or convention of any religious 
body shall dictate the things that I must believe, that 
my life may be right. 

If one is willing to accept the major points of a creed 
that any scholar, school of scholars or the ecclesiastical 
authorities of some church shall dictate, solely because 
they have dictated it, he will find that that creed is of 
little or no value to him as an inspiration of life. 

It is hardly possible, in any real sense, for one to be-- 
lieve anything for no other reason than that he is told 
to, or feels that he ought to believe it. That one can 
actually believe any creed it will be necessary that he has. 
discovered the truth of it through his own mental pro- 
cesses. We cannot unquestioningly accept it, ready 
built, from the mind of others. A creed that we have 
not reached by our own searchings, one that has been 
untouched by the processes of our own minds and expe- 
rience of our lives will be of little or no value to us. 

Since men reach so many diflferent conclusions that 
lead them to build so many differing creeds, and when, 
in so many instances, honest and capable men earnestly 
searching for the truth reach conclusions and make 
creeds that are diametrically opposed to each other, we 
must conclude that it is impossible under any finite cir- 
cumstances to have an infallible creed. It would, there- 
fore, be the height of injustice to demand that, to 
gain citizenship in Christ's Kingdom, we must believe in 
an infallible creed, for that would be demanding the 
impossible. 



68 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

It is not demanded of any that they beheve in any 
creed other than the one that they build for themselves. 
If this creed is the same as that accepted by others, if 
it is the same creed that has been stated by the church 
councils, the official creed of some church body, well and 
good, but each person in accepting this creed, must, if 
the creed is in a personal sense his own, after searching 
in the light of his own reason, and in his own experience, 
have found the creed to be the one that in reality he 
believes. 

We must have a creed; but to be of value it should 
be one built from our own reason and experience. By 
this I do not mean that we should ignore either the 
knowledge possessed by the fathers or the conclusions 
of those who are especially fitted to speak authoritatively 
on these matters today. What I do mean is, that having 
secured all of the enlightenment that we can get the 
creed that we accept as our own should square with the 
jiorm of our own reason and experience. 

We must not claim for our creeds infallibiHty. No 
creed is infallible, no creed contains all of the truth. 
Each successive generation has claimed that its creeds 
were the last word of truth, but the next generation has 
usually taken an advance step in creed building, only to 
claim in turn that its creeds had reached the goal of per- 
fection. But no creed is infallible. 

There are those who say ''Let us have no creeds. 
Christ was not a creed-builder, and creeds are so fal- 
lible, they so widely differ and are the cause of so much 
turmoil and dissension, it is very apparent that they are 
evil." It might be possible to do without written creeds 
But having no written creed is very far from having no 
creed. A creed is the statement of our religious belief. 
And whether written or unwritten we all have formu- 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 69 

lated in a more or less systematic manner the things that 
we believe. 

Those who have certain beliefs in common are 
naturally inclined to band themselves together for the 
purpose, among other things, of propagating these be- 
liefs. It is right and proper that this organization should 
make an official statement of the beliefs that these mem- 
bers have in common, and this statement will be their 
creed. 

Certain ones who have believed alike concerning 
Christ and the Bible, and other matters of religion, have 
organized a church and have formulated and stated the 
beliefs that they held in common; this is what we call 
church creed. There is no church, whether they recog- 
nize the fact or not, that is without a creed. They may 
not have an official document setting forth their beliefs, 
but there are certain distinctive doctrines that that 
church, as a denomination, hold as essential truths, and 
in the sermons of their preachers, and the writings of 
their authors these distinctive doctrines are set forth in 
such a way that the world is made to know that in par- 
ticular this body of people are banded together to 
propagate certain beliefs; and these are their creed. 

We are learning that it is not wise for churches to 
compel all members to give assent to every point of the 
church creed. That is, if the creed speaks on minor and 
disputed points. It is perfectly right for a church to 
make a creed stating what a majority of the members 
believe, but it is not wise nor just to compel every mem- 
ber joining to affirm his belief in every word of such a 
creed. One joining an organization should, of course, 
be in harmony with the salient points of the organiza- 
tion's creed. It would be unwise for a Unitarian to join 
an evangelical church, or one who believes in Maryolatry 



70 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

to join a Protestant church. It is wise that any church 
should demand that those joining agree nearly enough 
with their fundamental doctrines to be in accord with 
the purpose of their organization. This is easy to ac- 
complish without demanding assent to the minor as 
well as the major points of their creed. For only the 
insincere or the covert enemy would desire to have mem- 
bership in an organization in whose cardinal doctrines 
he did not believe. 

It should be borne in mind that revelation is pro- 
gressive. There never has been a time when we have 
known all that there was to know concerning God, nor 
is that time now. We must seek that we may find Him ; 
and since His revelation is progressive each generation 
should know more of Him than the one preceding. We 
are constantly building toward God, and the creed is 
the scaffolding that we construct and on which we may 
climb. Our fathers builded some of this scaffolding; 
they stated in their creeds such truth as they had dis- 
covered. We learn more about God than they knew, 
and we discover that certain things that they believed 
are not true. We should, therefore, retain that of the 
old scaffolding that we find still to be serviceable, and 
tear away that which we have found to be superfluous 
or unsound material. That is we should retain that 
of the creeds of the past that we find to be true and 
remove that part of them that we no longer believe. 
Then we may build upon the old that we have retained, 
such new truth as we have discovered. Our scaffolding 
will then be nearer the ultimate truth than was our 
father's. Our children will build onto the part of our 
structure that they find to be true, and will tear out the 
necessary and unsound timber that we have built in. 
And their children will do the same with their building. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 71 

and so on from generation to generation we build this 
scaffolding upward, toward the final and perfect concep- 
tion of God and truth. If our creed is of no use to us 
as a scaffolding to climb toward God it is a useless 
structure. 

Dr. F. H. Stockdale has illustrated somewhat like 
this : A creed is a telescope to be used in our search for 
God. Some person has described their amazement when 
he first looked through a telescope to discover how near 
it made the stars seem and how wonderful they ap- 
peared. He said that he though that if the stars seemed 
so near to him when he looked through the small end 
of the telescope, how very near indeed they would seem 
if he should look through the large end. So he requested 
that the telescope be turned about. The narrator then 
told of the amazement in finding that this, instead of 
making the stars seem nearer made them appear to be 
farther away and less distinct than they had appeared to 
the naked eye. 

A creed is a telescope through which we may look 
upon God. If the creed is of our own building, if from 
searchings and from our experience this creed has been 
evolved (even if it is the same creed in which many 
others believe) it will bring God nearer and make Him 
seem more real. It is the creed that gives us a clearer 
vision of God that is worth while. A creed that does 
not is not only of no value but a positive detriment. 
Many of us, however, turn the creed about ; we look 
through the large end rather than the small one. That 
is, we make the creed the all important thing rather than 
the vision that it brings to us. The outcome is that the 
creed, instead of making God more real to us, makes 
Him appear smaller and farther away. Many a man, 
while contending loyally for a creed, has lost his vision 



72 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

of God. And the reason was because the creed assumed 
too great proportions. Whenever a creed becomes more 
important in our estimation than the vision of truth, we 
will become incapable of grasping the vision of truth. It 
is for this reason that men who know little or nothing of 
God, and the spirit of whose lives is quite contrary to 
the spirit of the citizen of The Kingdom, and whose 
conception of truth seems narrow and uninspired to the 
man of vision, fight so tenaciously for certain minor 
points of a dogmatic creed. To them the creed is the 
all-important thing, and they are practically incapable 
of seeing spiritual truth in its right perspective because 
they look through the wrong end of their creed 
telescope. 

The creed that gives one a clear vision of God may 
cloud the vision of another. We, therefore, have no 
right to demand that another accept our creed, for that 
which brings us close to the truth may keep them away 
from it, and that which may help others in their spiritual 
life may be a hindrance to us. It is right that we should 
offer our creed to others, hoping that they will find it 
to be of real spiritual assistance. If, however, they find 
that it is not, we must be tolerant, not interfering with 
their creed. 

No creed is the last word concerning truth, all creeds 
are capable of improvement. If we cannot improve 
our own creeds, our children will be able to do so. 
We should never be satisfied with the creed that we 
have, but we should constantly search for new truth 
with which to build greater creeds. The vision that we 
have now we should build into our creed for today, 
stating emphatically what we believe. But we must 
not stop here, but must continue a search for more truth, 
and as new light comes to us tomorrow we must add 
that to the creed that we already have. And when we 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 73 

discover that we no longer believe certain things that 
we once believed, that after all these things are only 
false work, we must reconstruct our creed, casting aside 
that which we have found to be false, and building into 
it the new truth that we have discovered. I not only 
have the right, but it is my duty, to search constantly 
for a clearer vision, and to change my creed with each 
new perception of truth. I must believe thoroughly that 
which makes my creed for to-day, and if I change my 
mind to-morrow (and I have a perfect right to do so) 
I must believe and state, with just as great assurance, 
what I believe then. But I must not claim that each 
creed contains the full orb of truth. 

It is a serious mistake to claim that any creed enunci- 
ates all the truth. For to make such a claim for any 
creed is to declare other creeds to be false in every 
point in which they differ from ours. We should not 
attempt to profess that our creed is other than a state- 
ment of our understanding of the truth. While our 
creed states the truth as we understand the truth to-day 
it may need restating and possibly rebuilding along other 
lines when we understand more of the truth. And al- 
though our creed may declare that which is entirely 
true as far as it goes we may virtually make it false by 
claiming that it is the whole truth. 

I know of no better illustration of all this than that 
old story of the blind men who went to ''see" the ele- 
phant. After they had ''seen" they quarreled. One 
said that the elephant was a tall, boneless sort of animal 
and he was at a loss to know how it could stand. An- 
other said that the first was right in saying that the 
animal was tall but that it was mostly bone, and could, 
therefore, stand without the slightest difficulty. A third 
declared that certainly his companions had not *'seen" the 



74 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

elephant, for it was far from being tall, but rather a 
broad and extremely bulky animal. Now it is evident 
that the first blind man felt the beast's trunk, the second 
a leg, and the last the body. They were all right as far 
as they had investigated, nevertheless, they were all 
wrong, because each claimed that he had the whole truth. 
It is just so in the matter of creeds. The Samaritan 
claimed that Mt. Gerizim was a Holy Mount because 
God was there; and they were right, Mt. Gerizim was 
a holy mount, for God was there. The Jew said, *Tn 
Jerusalem we find God, we should worship Him there." 
And they, too, were right, for God was in Jerusalem and 
it was right that they should worship Him there. But 
on this point the creed of both the Samaritan and the 
Jew became virtually false because their adherents af- 
firmed that they proclaimed the whole truth, the Samari- 
tan saying that God might be worshipped only on Mt. 
Gerizim, and the Jew declaring that He could be wor- 
shipped only in Jerusalem. We know now that He 
could be worshipped on either Mt. Gerizim or at Jeru- 
salem so that in their claim to possessing the whole truth 
and being alone right they both became wrong. We 
will find a parallel to this in the present day conten- 
tions of the adherents of various creeds. The truths as 
stated in the creeds are often incomplete, not all the 
truth, and, therefore, some who hold views that seem to 
be absolutely the contrary of our own may be seeing 
the other side of our truth. And we will discover that 
creeds that we though to be diametrically opposed to 
each other are not so irreconcilable as we have supposed, 
but may in time prove to be in complete harmony. 

It behooves us, therefore, to be extremely tolerant and 
never to claim that our creed is an infallible statement 
of all of the truth. Those of Protestantism are much 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 75 

closer together in their creeds than they realize, for all 
creeds contain some elements of truth and no creed 
contains all of the truth. 

We will come nearest to the ultimate and perfect con- 
ception of truth not by a zealous contention for estab- 
lished creeds, but by an active search for truth, always 
remembering that assent to any formulated creed is not 
the requirement to gain citizenship in The Kingdom, and 
that creeds are of value only as scaffolding with which 
we climb toward God, or as a telescope that may give 
to us a clearer and more perfect vision of Him. 

LAW 

While the spiritual life cannot be controlled by tem- 
poral statutory laws, and the "Thou shalt'' and 'Thou 
shalt not" is in no wise the law of the spiritual King- 
dom; although Christ was not a law-giver, nevertheless, 
that which we call moral law is constantly the outgrowth 
of the impulse which is born of obedience to the divine 
principle of love. 

There are those who claim that because The King- 
dom is spiritual, and Christ was not a law-giver, that 
citizens of The Kingdom are not subject to the control 
of moral law. Some years ago a minister was brought 
to trial in a Methodist conference charged with gross 
immorality. The man said that he had been guilty of 
the act as charged, but that his spiritual life was such 
that he was no longer bound by the laws that men 
called moral. He claimed that things that were com- 
mon and unclean to those of lesser spiritual attainments 
than his were to him clean and holy. The conference, 
very justly, expelled him from the ministry and from 
membership in the church, for a man does not reach 



76 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

the place on this earth where he is superior to moral 
law. We saw in the lecture on ''The Constitution of 
The Kingdom'' how moral law was always an outgrowth 
of spiritual life. 

Although we are citizens of a spiritual Kingdom, and 
the springs that feed our life are not temporal but eter- 
nal, nevertheless, we are living in the realm of tem- 
poral things, and in many things we are limited by the 
fetters of temporality. While we are citizens of the 
Kingdom of Heaven we also have citizenship in some 
kingdom of this world. Having responsibilities pertain- 
ing to the spiritual life does not in any way lessen the 
responsibilities that we have in connection with the tem- 
poral life. When we have the right perspective we will 
understand that the temporal should not be neglected 
for the spiritual, but should be under the control of it. 
We cannot say that we live above the control of the 
laws that are temporal, for we do not, but the temporal 
laws should be the outgrowth of the higher laws, the 
principles of the spiritual Kingdom. 

If each citizen of Christ's Kingdom was so thoroughly 
equipped in judgment and spiritual balance, and if all 
had sufficient understanding of economic and sociologi- 
cal conditions, and vision of great breadth so that all 
would be equally capable of translating the spiritual 
principle into the moral law, every citizen of The King- 
dom might be granted the privilege of being a ''law unto 
himself." But we find that to solve the great moral 
problems and establish wise moral laws we must have 
the composite judgment of the many who are trying 
to bring into the temporal that which is inspired by the 
principle of the spiritual. No one person is equal to so 
great a task. 

We find that those who are equally sincere in their 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 77 

desire to bring Christ's Kingdom to earth differ very 
widely as to what will be required to make possible its 
coming, and are not at all agreed upon the conditions 
that will obtain when it is come. However, the spiritual 
leaven, working through consecrated Christians, even- 
tually brings about an ultimatum which is the composite 
judgment of the thinking body of the citizens of The 
Kingdom on earth, and this judgment of the thinking 
whole leavens all society and thus inspires our moral 
law. Therefore, the only safe rule for conduct along 
the line of fundamental morals must be not the judg- 
ment of the individual but the conscience of the whole. 

Some one objects that this is not a definite enough 
authority. Why, we hear questioned, did not the Mas- 
ter make authoritative deliverances on all moral ques- 
tions ? Why did He not give to the world a moral code 
as Moses did to the Children of Israel? This would 
have been impossible, for Christ had to do with things 
that are eternal, and no moral code can do more than 
meet a passing demand of temporal society. Aside 
from the decalogue, which is the foundation of moral 
law until this day, no moral code can become permanent 
in the changing conditions of society. The changing 
conditions demand changing laws. That which is im- 
moral in one generation and under the particular cir- 
cumstances of that time may be perfectly moral in an- 
other generation and under different circumstances, and 
vice versa. To illustrate : 

Moses found that it was necessary to command that 
the Children of Israel should be at constant enmity with 
the peoples that dwelt in the land into which they were 
going, that they should have no dealings with those 
round about them. It would have been an act of im- 
morality for an Israelite to marry a Hittite as it was 



78 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

an evil to consider an Amorite a friend. This was an 
extremely necessary piece of legislation for that people 
at that time. For if a Jew, then, before their national 
ideals had been formed, and while they were yet in the 
childhood of their race, had made friends of the sur~ 
rounding nations, if they had intermarried with these 
folk whose ideals were so different from their own. 
and whose God was not Jehovah, they would have lost 
their national ideals and their own God for those of 
their neighbors. And the Hebrew race would not have 
fulfilled its mission of giving to the world the truth of 
their being but one God. Conditions have now mate- 
rially changed, and we understand the world to be one 
great brotherhood. It is now incumbent upon us to 
carry our ideals to the other nations of the earth. While 
to the Children of Israel in the wilderness it was im- 
moral to consider the neighboring nations as friends it 
is now immoral to consider them anything else. 

So the changing order demands changing law. No 
law-giver could build a code of laws to fit every condi- 
tion of society in every age. But Jesus Christ gave a 
message which will fit every age and meet the demands 
of every condition of society, He gave to the world 
eternal principles that will be the foundation of right 
laws for all time. 

Human slavery was a common institution when Christ 
was on earth. If He had been a Law-giver He should 
have condemned this institution or else we would have 
had no Christian authority for destroying it. But in the 
evolution of society the time was not yet ripe to speak 
out against slavery. The Master, however, gave to the 
world the law of love, and there came the time when it 
became clear to us that we could not conform to that 
law and hold human beings in bondage. So as the out- 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 79 

growth of this divine principle or law of love, we came 
to understand that human slavery was immoral, and 
thus to legislate against it. 

Nowhere in the teachings of Christ do we find any 
direct command that justifies our fight against the liquor 
traffic, but Christ was no law-giver. The cardinal prin- 
ciple of The Kingdom — love — has made us see that it 
was altogether out of harmony with any ethical system 
that would square with the norm of Christian ideals to 
allow in our midst, and give the license of our govern- 
ment to such an institution as the organized liquor traf- 
fic. Therefore, the church of Jesus Christ is making an 
effective effort, through temporal laws, to legislate it 
out of existence. 

Thus we see that those who are citizens of The 
Kingdom are not free from observing moral law be- 
cause they are subject to a higher law. Moreover, we 
find that it is their duty to do their utmost to bring 
into existence such moral laws as are in harmony with, 
and inspired by the divine and eternal principle given 
the world by Jesus Christ, the principle which is the law 
of His Kingdom — Love, 

The church is a divinely inspired institution which is 
an instrument in the hand of God for the uplift of the 
world. 

A creed is a scaffolding that one may use to climb 
toward God, or a telescope through which one may see 
God. Each man should build his own creed. 

Those who are citizens of Christ's Kingdom are 
bound to observe all moral law. 



CHRIST^S PLAN OF CONQUEST 

If the time shall come, and we know that it will, when 
''every knee shall bow and every tongue confess," and 
when 'The Kingdoms of this world are become the 
Kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ,'' there will 
have been made the mightiest of all conquests, and the 
victory will be the mightiest of all victories. 

What a conquest it is from apparently so small 
a beginning to the possession of all things. Did you 
ever stop to think that The Kingdom had its beginning 
on earth in a nation of positive insignificance, a nation 
that played a very small part in the affairs of the world 
of education, commerce, or society? The Hebrew peo- 
ple spent many of the years of their history in bondage 
to other nations ; as a people they were not great war- 
riors; their commerce never bulked large in the world's 
commerce of that day; they knew little of art and 
science; they were not philosophers, and in their re- 
ligion they were bigots. It is well that they were 
religious bigots, for their bigotry has preserved for us 
the truth that there is but one God, but their religious 
teachings were so narrow that they had little considera- 
tion for any religion outside of their own nation. How 
small indeed is the place given the Hebrew race by the 
historian as he writes of the world's progress. And the 
little attention they do receive is due largely to the fact 
that Jesus Christ was a Jew and not to the importance 
of the Jewish nation. 

He that is King of this Kingdom which shall even- 
tually conquer all things was born a Jew. He was 
not born in a palace with the rich, but in the manger of 
a public inn. He renounced the robes of royalty and 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 8i 

lived as a peasant. He had as His followers not men of 
wealth and culture, not men of power who came from 
the highest strata of even the insignificant Jewish so- 
ciety, but men from the humblest walks of life, fisher- 
men, a publican tax-gatherer, men who were all, in a 
large degree, unlearned. The King did not die as a 
victor but as a criminal on the cross. 

If the method of this King's conquest is the same as 
that of the kings of this world, this indeed is an un- 
promising beginning, and it would seem that The King- 
dom would have been doomed to fail from the start. 
But the plan of conquest that is inspired and led by 
King Christ, that which will bring so great an ultimate 
victory, is not like that of the kings of this world. 

Zachariah received the word of the Lord for Zerub- 
babel that may well serve as a text to explain Christ's 
plan of conquest. It is, ''Not by might nor by power, 
but by my spirit, saith the Lord.'' 

The conquest of the crescent is the conquest of the 
sword. The Mohammedan that would please Allah most 
must spill much blood; he must be a zealous warrior. 
Those who followed the crescent have won great tem- 
poral victories in the past; they have been victorious 
when outnumbered and outgeneraled, because they 
fought with a frenzy inspired by a religious zeal. See- 
ing the great temporal victories won by the warfare of 
the sword the Christians have, in days gone by, taken up 
the sword for their conquest. 

It is said that after the Emperor Constantine had 
espoused Christianity, inspired either by the vision of 
the cross in the clouds or from political motives, or 
both, he commanded that the sign of the cross should be 
put on the shield of every soldier, and that his entire 
army must be baptized in the Christian faith. Any re- 



82 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

fusing to receive such baptism were to be put to death 
with the sword. It is said that in one day Constantine's 
entire army accepted the Christian faith. But it is to be 
seriously doubted if any great number of them became 
Christians. If some preachers, to-day, could use the 
same methods of making converts, it might greatly help 
their statistical report. But this is not Christ's plan of 
conquest. 

In the Crusades the Christians made conquest of 
Islam not after the plan of Christ but after the plan of 
the prophet of Allah. The followers of Peter the Her- 
mit made a conquest of the sword. In face of the fact 
that at the time the Crusades were inaugurated "the 
Mohammedan conquests had been at a standstill for 
more than four hundred years, and the old fanatic zeal 
of the Islam had given away to the pursuit of worldly 
interests and the fostering of high culture''"^ — and they, 
therefore, were not in condition to make a strong de- 
fense; nevertheless, the Crusades failed. The Christian 
can never conquor with the sword. 

The plan of conquest that will give victory to The 
Kingdom of Christ is not the conquest of the sword, 
''for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal." Christ 
taught the doctrine of non-resistance. He taught that 
''They that take the sword shall perish with the sword." 
Surely then the kingdom that makes conquest with the 
sword will, in the end, perish, but The Kingdom of 
Christ will be victorious. 

The last night that the Master was with His dis- 
ciples He attempted, by figure, to show them that they 
had not as yet experienced, in any real sense, persecu- 
tion, but that they must be prepared to meet it later 
when it would fall heavily upon them. But they failed 



♦Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 83 

to understand Him. He had said: "When I sent ye 
without purse and scrip and shoes, lacked ye anything?" 
And they said, "Nothing/' 

"Then said He unto them. But now he that hath a 
purse let him take it and likewise his scrip and he that 
hath no sword let him sell his garment and buy one." 

And the disciples, not understanding that the Master 
was speaking to them in figure, warning them against 
the enemies that they would meet, and the hardships 
that they would be compelled to endure, said to Him : 

''Lord, behold here are two swords." 

Some have said that Jesus never evidenced any humor, 
but I am certain that there was a twinkle of humor in 
His eye as He answered His disciples, 

"It is enough." 

Two swords enough to meet all the opposition that 
would be waged against the gospel. Two swords 
enough to meet the opposition of King Herod, two 
swords enough to meet the persecution of the Roman 
Empire, two swords enough with which to meet the 
whole world! Hardly enough if Christ's method of 
conquest had been that of the sword. But two swords 
were more than enough to meet all these enemies and 
be victorious when the warfare was after the plans of 
the Christ. 

Christ's plan of conquest is not by might. He taught 
constantly peace and non-resistance. He said in the 
Sermon on the Mount, "I say unto you, that ye resist 
not evil ; that whosoever shall smite thee on the right 
cheek turn to him the other also. And if any man sue 
thee at the law and take away thy coat let him have thy 
cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go 
with him a mile go with him twain." This is not the 
conquest of might. The might of force of things that 



84 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

are temporal have no part in the advancement of The 
Kingdom. 

Nor is it by power. The Master said, ''Blessed are 
the poor in spirit : for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." 

If His followers had understood this better in the 
past there would not have been in the history of the 
Christian church that which makes every true follower 
of Jesus Christ hang his head with shame. If, to-day, 
we understood as we should the fact that it is not by 
power. The Kingdom would advance in the earth with 
much greater rapidity than it does. 

The church has always lost in the spiritual when it 
sought power in things temporal. When the church 
possessed more temporal power than any earthly king- 
dom has ever possessed the world was in the night of 
superstition and ignorance, it was a time of tyrants and 
of great injustices, and the world knew little or nothing 
of Christ's law of love. In history this time is known 
as the "Dark Ages.'' During this period The Kingdom 
lost rather than advanced. The temporal power brought 
no victories for the Christ. 

No temporal power will advance the Kingdom of 
Christ to-day. The church is constantly losing by seek- 
ing the power of the world. The Protestant church is 
not striving to obtain the reins of government, nor are 
they asking special favors from the rulers of the earth, 
for this let us daily give thanks to God. I fear, how- 
ever, that we are seeking temporal power in another 
way. 

Let us pause to analyze some of the efforts that the 
Protestant church has been making of late in America 
and see if we are not seeking to advance by some other 
plan than that laid down by the Master. 

More than ever before, we, as a church, are putting 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 85 

great stress on numbers. We estimate the church's 
strength very largely from her statistical tables. Stu- 
pendous efforts are being made by every denomination 
to show large increases in membership, ^very pastor 
knows that there is extremely heavy pressure brought 
to bear upon every minister holding a church to in- 
crease his membership. And the pastor who can show 
the greatest increase receives credit for having had the 
largest degree of success. We are using every conceiv- 
able method to increase our church membership, when 
the only justifiable method is the appeal of the gospel. 
We feel that when we can show an increase in mem- 
bership that we are giving proof of advancement in The 
Kingdom, when it is often the reverse. There were 
several times during the earthly ministry of Jesus that 
he could have established an organization that would 
have been of great power in a temporal way. He could 
have had a multitude more of followers than He did have 
if He had not demanded so much of them in the matter 
of spiritual life, and if He had not demanded such 
rigorous sacrifice. But the ministry of the Master was 
given to the delivery of a message to as many as would 
willingly listen, and to the doing of good, and not in 
displaying to the world a multitude of followers. 

We are judging the success of a preacher very much,, 
these days, by the size of the congregations that attend 
his ministry. The man who preaches well the true gos- 
pel message will, I have no doubt, have many hungry 
and anxious hearers. But the preacher who works to 
get crowds as an end, or who lusts for crowds for his 
own satisfaction, will fail. He may get his crowds, but 
he will fail in getting to them the vital message of the 
cross. The crowds that attend some men's ministry 
are the badge of their failure rather than of their 



86 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

success. It is not difficult to get crowds if one under- 
stands psychology and has some native genius. The mul- 
titudes are always willing to come after a little novelty 
Curiosity concerning the eccentricities of a preacher, a 
sensational sermon or a moving picture machine will 
bring crowds to church, but they will not bring them to 
God. The men who use these methods know that they 
fail in bringing results for the spiritual kingdom. But 
the demand is for crowds, and the man who can pack 
his church with people is considered the successful 
preacher, and is called to be the pastor of the strongest 
churches. 

There were many times that great multitudes followed 
Jesus. Once, you will remember, they followed Him to 
hear what He had to say. He taught them all day, 
and when evening had come He did not want to send 
them away hungry, but having no bread to give them 
and no money with which to buy He took the two loaves 
and five fishes, and, by miracle made it sufficient to 
feed the multitude. After this they insisted that He 
become their king. He, taking a boat, went across the 
sea to escape them, for they desired to make Him their 
King because of the miracle rather than because of His 
message. They followed Him across the sea, and came 
to Him the next morning again demanding that He be- 
come their King. They would willingly have followed 
Him if He had continued performing miracles. But He 
refused, telling them of the demands of the spiritual 
kingdom so that they, disappointed, every one left Him. 
This is not the only time that Jesus turned away crowds 
that desired to follow Him from motives other than the 
highest. Jesus had no ambition for crowds if they fol- 
lowed from a wrong motive. His desire was to get a 
message to the hearts of men, and when crowds followed 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 87 

Him demanding signs and wonders they would not listen 
to His message. To-day when the crowds demand 
novelty, sensational preaching and moving pictures they 
will not listen to the message of the cross. 

From a temporal standpoint there may be profit in 
great crowds; but there is no gain for the Kingdom of 
Christ without the crowds are hungry for, and willing 
to listen to the message of the gospel. By this I do 
not mean that every bore who preaches, in the most 
uninteresting fashion, some of his favorite dogmatics 
calling them the gospel, is the preacher whose work will 
advance The Kingdom: neither is the Kingdom ad- 
vanced because great crowds have been attracted by 
some form of sensation or entertainment passed off un- 
der the name of religion. 

The Kingdom is noe more advanced by enrolling as 
church members men influential in the high places in the 
earth than enrolling those of the humbler walks of life. 
Do we not often strive to win the favor of those in high 
places more than we do that of those who occupy more 
humble positions? Pastors and laymen often say, *Ti 

we could only get Mr. M it would mean so much to 

us, for he is a man of much influence in the city and 
state.'' It is not that we get any one but that we get the 
message of Christ to them. In The Kingdom the man 
who has great prestige in the affairs of this world, and 
the man who is unknown outside of the radius of his own 
immediate neighborhood, stand as equals, provided they 
have attained alike in the things of the spiritual. The 
things that give men prestige in the affairs of the tem- 
poral will not give them high rank in the affairs of the 
Kingdom of Christ. That a church has within its mem- 
bership the most influential men of the community, 
state, or nation does not mean that that church is of 



88 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

more power in advancing The Kingdom than a church 
of the most humble membership. 

Neither is it by the power of wealth that The King- 
dom makes conquest. Too much of the church's energy 
is used in developing the material side. We boast of 
our fine church buildings. One pastor too often feels 
that he is more fortunate than others because the mem- 
bers of his church are well supplied with this world's 
goods. We put forth great effort to build fine edifices 
as evidences of the power of the church. But valuable 
church property and a wealthy church membership does 
not signify that The Kingdom is making a successful 
conquest for men's hearts. All too often it means that 
the church is failing in promoting The Kingdom, for 
it is not by the power of wealth that King Christ and 
His hosts advance to claim the kingdoms of the world 
for their own. 

A look into the past will show us that the periods of 
real spiritual advancement, that the times when many 
sought and found God, the epochs when great hymns 
were written, and men made great discoveries of spir- 
itual truth, were not times when the church was in 
special favor with those who stood in the high places 
of the earth, nor was it when the church was an insti- 
tution of great wealth, it was not during a time when 
the great masses of the people, religious and irreligious, 
sought to be entertained by religious services. In the 
times when these things prevailed the church lost its 
vision. Surfeited with wealth and patronized by those 
in power the church became recreant in delivering its 
divine message, its leaders lost their spiritual perspec- 
tive and became absorbed in the affairs of the material, 
until at times the church practically ceased to be an 
instrument for the promotion of Christ's Kingdom, and 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 89 

deteriorated into a great material organization existing 
for material ends only. 

This was the condition of the Jewish churches two 
thousand years ago. Rich, and having influence with 
the Roman government, they had lost their vital contact 
with God, and their worship was of the most legal sort, 
a religion of form rather than of spirit and life. John 
the Baptist came as a forerunner of Christ; he was no 
rabbi; he had no favor with the Roman authorities; he 
was not a man of wealth and had no refinement ; he did 
not entertain the multitudes with his learning, nor with 
captivating oratory. He was only a rude hermit dressed 
in camel's hair and girded with a leathern girdle, living 
on a steady diet of locust and wild honey. His speech 
was a blunt recital of the sins of the people, and a 
warning to flee from the wrath to come. True, he 
gained little as this world counts gain, for his loyalty 
to his mission lost for him his head. Nevertheless, he 
was the capable forerunner of Christ Himself, and did 
more, preaching under the open sky by the River Jor- 
dan, to reach Jerusalem with a vital spiritual message, 
than all the Jewish Hierarchy, with its wealth and in- 
fluence, with its learned rabbis and majestic ceremonies 

When the church of Rome had so far forgotten its 
divine mission that its chief ambition was for temporal 
power, great wealth, and magnificent cathedrals; when 
it had so far forgotten the vision of the cross that the 
Pope sent Tetzel into Germany to peddle indulgences 
that he might add to the splendor of St. Peter's, we find 
that the church wielded absolutely no influence for up- 
lift. The morals inspired by the church were of the very 
lowest type, and its religion was one of dead forms. 
Then came Martin Luther, the humble monk of Wit- 
tenburg. In the Reformation that followed there was no 



90 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

power of wealth, the princes that became a part of the 
Lutheran movement had little more influence than the 
most humble peasant. The great aim of the Reforma- 
tion was to bring to the masses the spiritual message 
of the doctrine of Salvation by faith. The Kingdom 
had made no progress during the days of the temporal 
power and wealth of the church, but it moved forward 
with mighty strides under the humble leaders of the 
Reformation. 

In the first of the eighteenth century the Church of 
England was rich and powerful, but the morals of the 
clergy were such that it brings a feeling of shame to 
speak of them. The spiritual life of the church was 
dead, their services had lost their power, and their re- 
ligion had deteriorated into a form. Then came the 
Holiness club at Oxford. The Wesleys had neither 
wealth, nor influence with those who sat in the seats 
of the mighty. They were barred from the pulpits of 
the church, and were compelled to go into the fields and 
onto the streets to preach to the folk of the humbler 
station in Hfe. England felt a stir of spiritual life that 
was more than a form, it was a power in the lives of 
men, a true salvation and the Protestant world was 
moved to a new vital piety. Whenever the church 
sought to advance either by might or by power the 
Kingdom of Christ lost rather than gained. 

'*Not by might nor by power but by my spirit, saith 
the Lord." The weapons of our warfare are not carnal 
but spiritual. The power of our conquest is the power 
of the spirit of the Christ. It is the way of the cross 
The way of the cross is the way of self-sacrifice; and 
the spirit of the Christ is the spirit of love which mani- 
fests itself in a life given over entirely to the service of 
others. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 91 

Nowhere in fiction do we find the spirit of the Christ 
more forcefully illustrated than in the great masterpiece 
of Victor Hugo's, "Les Miserables." Jean Valjean did 
not occupy a place of power or influence in the world. 
There were times that he might have attained these, 
but on the threshold of attainment he always gave it 
up to serve others. A galley slave, one haunted and 
hunted by the minions of the law, at every point he 
surrendered his happiness for the happiness of others. 
His youth was spent at the galleys because he stole 
bread for his sister's children, he died in a bare attic 
in an effort to make Cosette happy. Unknown and 
unloved, save by Cosette, his life was, from the stand- 
point of the world, a tragic failure. But as we read 
this story we feel that this life towers above that of 
the man of wealth and of power, above those who were 
loved and were happy. And this because his life was 
a life of sacrificing service. 

When measured by the material standards of success 
the life of Jesus Christ was a pitiful failure. ''He is 
despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and 
acquainted with grief.'' ''The foxes have holes, and 
the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man had 
not where to lay His head." He renounced His right 
to the royal robes. He turned aside from those who 
would make Him king of a temporal kingdom, He was 
hated by the powers of the church, and heard gladly 
only by the common people, He was crucified as a 
malefactor by religious leaders. And yet no life has 
had so large a place in influencing the world. The 
greatest event of all history was not some military 
victory, it was not the conquering of some great 
empire, it was not the success of either a great man 
or nation. The greatest event in history, the event 



92 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

which above all others means uplift for the world, was 
the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Christ's plan of con- 
quest is by the way of the cross, which is the way of 
self-sacrificing service. 

In a parable Jesus once likened the Kingdom of 
Heaven to leaven that a woman hid in three measures 
of meal, and the leaven leavened all the meal. Again 
He likened The Kingdom unto a mustard seed, ''which 
indeed is the least of all seeds,'' but in it was the 
power of life. And the mustard seed, when it was 
planted, grew to be the ''greatest among herbs, and 
became a tree so that the birds of the air came and 
lodged in the branches thereof." You will notice that 
Jesus did not liken The Kingdom to that which bulked 
large in the eyes of the world, but rather to that which 
appeared insignificant but was pregnant with life. 

Not by the might of armies, not by the power of 
nations, not by wealth, nor yet through the influence 
of those who stand in the high places in the earth, but 
by the self-sacrificing lives of service of the citizens 
of The Kingdom, lives and service born of the spirit 
of love — by the humble, unpretentious life that is lived 
always for others, by the lives of those who do not 
seek position for themselves, by the life that is not one 
of war and contentions but of Christlike non-resistance, 
will society be leavened. This Christ spirit will be 
the mustard seed that will grow into the mighty tree 
of the everlasting Kingdom. When the kingdoms of 
this world have perished, when the great fortunes and 
the mighty fame that have been builded by men have 
been forgotten, the Christ will be reigning over a 
victorious Kingdom. 

Let me say once again, " 'Not by might, nor by 
power, but by my spirit,' saith the Lord." 



THE UNFOLDING REVELATION 

It is God's great task to reveal Himself to men. 

A people have always been like the God that they 
worship. The Greek Gods were immoral, therefore 
the morals of the Greek people were of a very low 
type. The Gods of the Hindus are cruel, therefore, 
we find that those who worship them are a cruel 
people. The Hebrews believed that Jehovah mani- 
fested bitter hatred toward His enemies, and they were 
constantly evidencing an extreme and vengeful hatred 
toward all of their .enemies. Only those who under- 
stand their god to be just and merciful are themselves 
just and merciful. Those who worship a god they 
believe to be impure will be impure ; if they under- 
stand their god to be pure they will strive to be pure 
themselves. 

It is, therefore, essential that, for a people to attain 
the highest, they must understand their god to be in 
every way the highest, for their standards will never 
be higher than those inspired by their god. In fact, 
they must understand that their god greatly trans- 
cends the possibility of their present attainments that 
they may progress toward him as their ideal. 

That the world may reach toward that which God 
would have them attain it must understand the true 
character of Him whom we worship. We will grow 
better as we understand more of God. We will find 
our ideals constantly elevated as we search for Him 
and discover more of His goodness, His purity, and 
His love of mercy. As we understand more of God's 
righteousness we will, ourselves, become more 
righteous. 



94 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

Jesus said, ''And this is life eternal, that they might 
know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom 
Thou hast sent/' We have eternal life only as we 
have pure hearts and we can have pure hearts only by 
imitating God in Christ. If God fails to reveal Him- 
self to men or if they refuse to seek Him how can they 
have life? 

That He may inspire in His children the highest and 
best life, it is God's great task to reveal Himself to 
them. It is no small task that is worthy of being the 
great task of the Almighty. Such a task as this is not 
the work of a day or of a generation, it is the work of 
all time, and I am not sure but that it is also the task 
of eternity. 

We are too much inclined to measure the move- 
ments of God by the finite conception of time. We 
feel that He should complete the great task of self- 
revelation in the span of a man's life on earth ; and 
that surely now after these many centuries that men 
have been searching for God, the revelation should be 
complete and we should know all that there is to know 
about Him. The fact is that each generation of the 
past has felt the same way and has said, ''We know 
God as He is." 

We forget that in the sweep of eternity "a thousand 
years is as a day," and the span of all time till now has 
not been long for God to have been working at this 
task of revealing Himself to men. Then men have 
always been so slothful in their search for Him, and so 
slow to receive the revelation that has, from time to 
time, been given them. For He sent them "prophets, 
and wise men and scribes, and some of them they 
killed and crucified and others they scourged in their 
synagogue and persecuted from city to city." God, in 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 95 

every age, has spoken to men who have refused to 
listen, He has tried to teach them and they would not 
learn. He has attempted to show Himself to them and 
they have refused to see Him. For these reasons it 
takes God much longer to reveal Himself to the world 
than it otherwise would. 

Again, man could not comprehend facts as great as 
those that have to do with the infinite in a moment 
or in a generation. It teaches us somewhat of the 
magnitude of the Almighty when we understand that 
through all these ages He has been at the task of 
revealing Himself to the world, and the world has 
been searching for Him, and yet we know compara- 
tively so little of Him. 

We talk of searching for God, and forget that He 
IS more anxious to reveal Himself to us than we are 
to discover Him, and that while we are seeking Him 
He is doing His utmost to show Himself to us. He 
has been trying to reveal Himself to all men, through 
all ages, everywhere. We search for Him in the 
pages of Holy Writ and find Him there, but forget 
that He is also revealing Himself in the grass, in the 
flowers, in the hills, and in the valleys, that we can see 
His majesty in the sun, and read Him in His wonder- 
ful handiwork in the firmament at night, in the moon 
and the stars. We may search for Him in nature and 
find Him, through His handiwork, there. If we search 
the pages of history we will find His footprints there. 
For one cannot fail to see the footprints of God as 
they study the movements of nations. Gibbon ex- 
pected to prove in "The Rise and Fall of the Roman 
Empire" that there was no divine providence; but no 
student can read that great work without discovering 
that Gibbon proved that which he set out to disprove. 



96 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

We can see the life of God in the lives of the men and 
women that we come in contact with in the affairs of 
every-day life. If we will let Him into our own life 
we can find Him there in a way that we can nowhere 
else. In fact if we do not open our lives to Him we 
will be unable to see Him where He is revealing Himself 
all round and about us. For it is the person whose 
life is open to the indwelling of the Almighty that will 
be able to comprehend the revelation that is on every 
side. We can see God everywhere and find Him in 
our own souls. 

It is because of the open hearts of the seers in times 
past that we can know that which we do concerning 
the character of God. When we see how little they 
knew of Him back when the record begins, and then 
see what we know of Him now it will be apparent that 
God is not failing in His self-revelation. Let us follow 
in a very brief way the progress of God's revelation as 
recorded for us in the Bible. 

How imperfectly the author of the story of the 
Garden of Eden understood the fact that God was a 
personal spirit unlimited by space, the maker of all 
things, from whose sight nothing could be hid ! How 
unlike the God that we know was the God that walked 
in the garden in the cool of the day hunting for the 
occupants that were hidden from Him in the foliage ! 

Josephus tells us that Abraham was the first man to 
understand that there was only one God. And there 
are some who believe that until the time of Moses the 
children of Israel looked upon Jehovah as the chief 
God, and that Moses was the first to teach that He was 
the only God. Whether it was Abraham or Moses it is 
a long way from the first comprehension of the fact 
that there is but one God to the conception of Him 
whom we know as God. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 97 

It was no small task for God to show that He was 
not like the Gods that many worshipped. It was not 
easy for Him to teach men that He was not a creature 
of hatred and jealousy. It is not to be wondered 
that the Jew was very slow to understand that 
Jehovah did not have a bitter hatred for all who did 
not worship Him, for the peoples on every side of 
them worshipped gods whom they thought to be 
creatures who exerted the most bitter hatreds, gods 
that were created rather than creators, gods supposed 
to have passions like the passions of those who wor- 
shipped them. How were the Children of Israel to 
understand that their God was not like these gods? 
It was not to be expected that they should at once 
understand how different was Jehovah from the gods 
of their neighbors. They could discover these things 
only as they sought for a revelation of the infinite in 
His handiwork in the world about them. And the 
language that told of God was almost too profound to 
be understood by a race of children such as were 
these Israelites, especially when there was no one who 
knew the language and could teach them. The lan- 
guage of the created world that God has used with 
which to speak to men has been deciphered little by 
little through the ages. 

But if the Children of Israel could have read this 
language it would not have told all, for much concern- 
ing God is so profound that it cannot be written in 
the language of created worlds. To know more they 
must have read very deeply in the experience of their 
own lives that they might see what God had written 
there. They could not read on the pages of history 
of how Jehovah had revealed Himself to others, for 
they were virtually in the morning of history, so they 



98 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

could not study of His dealings with others and 
thereby discover what manner of God he was. To 
find Him they must search for Him in His handiwork 
in nature, and they must discover Him in His dealings 
with themselves ; they must find Him in their joys and 
in their sorrows, in their defeats and in their victories. 
And as little by little they discovered how He dealt 
with them in these things they learned somewhat of 
the kind of God that He was. 

It is not to be wondered that the Children of Israel 
so often misunderstood and misinterpreted the signs 
of God in the world and in their own hearts. It was 
much easier to interpret God in the light of their ovv^n 
lusts and passions, to think of Him as the neighboring 
nations thought of their gods, than it was to search 
in the deeper things of life for God as He really was. 
And if many times they, following this, the course of 
the least resistance, they did not do less than many who 
have had more light have done since. For men have 
always been slow to make the effort that is required 
to reach out and attain the newer and better concep- 
tions of the infinite. 

It is true that those of Old Testament times had a 
very imperfect idea of the true character of God, but 
it was a constantly progressing conception. A perusal 
of the books of the Old Testment, and a study of the 
ideals of the Old Testament prophets, will reveal the 
fact that with a few exceptions each generation knew 
more of the true character of Jehovah than the pre- 
ceding one. 

The Hebrews were not always slow scholars in the 
school of the infinite. While they knew altogether too 
little of Jehovah at any time, a careful study of their 
knowledge of Him as it progressed from generation to 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 99 

generation will demonstrate that there were always 
great souls that were truly searching for Him, and in 
a very marvelous way finding Him. We will see that 
from time to time, with sudden bursts of light, they 
caught new visions of God and His methods of dealing 
with men; that one after another the prophets came 
to understand more of the language of the infinite and 
interrpeted it more perfectly to the people. It is true 
that those whom they sought to teach were not always 
willing to learn, often killing the prophets who came to 
them with God's message. But the message that these 
prophets had for the world did not die with them, but 
remained in the souls of some who had not rejected 
the new revelation, and the next searcher for truth did 
not have to rediscover that which had already been 
revealed, but building upon that which those who pre- 
ceded them had discovered, they moved forward 
toward yet greater truths. 

It is astonishing, when we consider all of the facts, 
to know of the broad vision that Moses and David, that 
Isaiah and Micah had of God and of His will toward 
men. A careful analysis of these men's conceptions 
of truth compared with the knowledge that we have 
today will give us a profound admiration for their 
understanding of the infinite. It is true that Moses 
made laws that are not in accord with the spirit of 
God as we know Him. This, however, should not 
surprise us, but it is remarkable that Moses with his 
limited knowledge of God should legislate so wisely 
and so largely in harmony with His spirit as we 
understand it now. 

Many of the Psalms are more in accord with the 
spirit of Heathenism than of Christianity. But we 
could hardly expect that it could be otherwise, for 



loo THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

David was surrounded by the spirit of Heathenism and 
was very far removed from the more perfect revelation 
concerning God that came through Jesus Christ. That 
which should demand our attention, however, is not 
the Heathen spirit in some of the Psalms, but the 
marvelous fact that in many things the vision of David 
was so very clear, and that he in general rose to such 
sublime heights in his understanding of Jehovah. 

From the beginning men have searched for God and 
found Him. He revealed Himself, as best He could, 
as the book of Hebrews declares, '*unto the fathers by 
the prophets.'' Little by little they caught a vision, 
bit by bit they learned of Him, until the time was 
propitious and then He spoke to us through His Son 
Jesus Christ who came to give to the world the com- 
plete revelation of God. 

Saying that a complete revelation came to the world 
through Jesus Christ does not mean that when His mis- 
sion on earth was finished that the world knew all that 
there was to know concerning God. It does not mean 
that because we have a complete record of the revela- 
tion given through Christ that we know all about 
God. For we are very far from knowing God in His 
entirety, for the revelation of Christ will not be ours 
until we fully comprehend Him (Christ). A language 
tells us nothing until we can read it ; we cannot under- 
stand all that is said in a language until we are so 
thoroughly versed in it that we can comprehend every 
shade of meaning that can be put into it. The revela- 
tion that God gave to the world through Jesus Christ 
will be ours only when we thoroughly comprehend 
Him. As Christ is the infinite in the form of the finite 
we find that it is more than the task of a few centuries 
to so know Him that the revelation He brought will 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST lol 

be entirely clear to us. We have been trying now for 
over two thousand years to fathom the Master and His 
message and we are just beginning to comprehend its 
true height and depth. 

It would be a message of little significance if it could 
be completely comprehended in a century or two. We 
cannot know the fullness of the life and message of 
Christ without spending great effort in the search, not 
because it is hidden from us but because it is a struggle 
for us, with the limited capacity of the finite, to fathom 
so profound a message as the Word of the Infinite. 

As we study the years since Christ left the earth we 
discover, that while there have been times that we 
have not been diligent in our search, and times when 
because of wickedness we lost our contact with God 
and did not move forward at all, as we have striven 
to understand the revelation that came to the world 
through Christ we have moved constantly toward a 
more complete understanding of God and of His will 
for us. We know more of Christ now, and of the 
Father through Him, than the world knew a hundred 
years ago, and we have faith to believe that our chil- 
dren will understand His message better than we do. 

It is true that there are some whose understanding of 
God is less perfect than was that of early Genesis. There 
are many who understand far less of His character than 
did David when he cried to the Lord to avenge him his 
enemies. This is true of the millions yet in Heathenism. 
But to find the true God they will not have to struggle 
through all the progressive stages that were traversed by 
those who searched for God when no man knew much 
concerning Him. It is like blazing a trail through a 
forest whose depths have never been pierced. It is a 
long and laborious task for the pioneer to discover the 



i02 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

way. He must search out his trail as he struggles 
forward day after day and week after week until at 
last he reaches his destination. But as he goes he 
blazes a trail. Then others travel over the same route 
that the pioneer traveled, but their journey is not long 
and hard like his, for the trail has already been blazed. 
Those who first found the road marked the way that 
others might follow. So the man who comes out of 
Heathenism to walk in the way of the cross will not 
have to rediscover the way, for others have blazed the 
trail. 

Some say, *'Why this long search for God? Why 
did He not write that which he wished the world to 
know concerning Himself on tables of stone, or why 
does He not write it in the sky that all under the dome 
of Heaven may read?" The answer is that He has 
written His revelation in a myriad of places that we 
might read, but we are so slow to understand. Many 
things may be written in a language, with which we are 
conversant, that we will not understand, things that 
pertain to a subject of which we have no knowledge. It 
will first be necessary that we have some fundamental 
knowledge of that which the language expresses before 
we can read that which has been written. To gain this 
knowledge will take time. We have a complete record 
of God's revelation, it is all written and we may read, 
but that we may comprehend it we must, in our own 
inner experience know something of Him whom we 
are seeking. Moreover, the revelation will be mean- 
ingless to us until we have tested it in our inner con- 
sciousness and read it there. 

As God has been revealing Himself through the past 
ages He is revealing Himself now and will continue 
to work at the task of revealing Himself until all have 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 103 

fathomed the height and depth of all things infinite. 
We will find a fuller and richer life as we know and 
understand Him better and we will discover Him only 
through actively searching for Him. The Master ex- 
horted men to ask, and to seek, and to knock. And He 
promised that to those who ''ask it shall be given," those 
who seek that they shall find, and to them that knock "it 
shall be opened unto them.'' It is through constant ask- 
ing, and by tireless seeking, and ceaseless knocking, that 
we find Him. Asking, seeking and knocking every- 
where, and always, for always and everywhere He is 
trying to reveal Himself to us. In the pages of liter- 
ature, in history, in nature, in the Bible and above all 
in the life of Jesus Christ, He has revealed Himself. 

We should seek Him everywhere, finding Him in 
the depths of our own souls. For we will find 
Him in everything only as we interpret these revela- 
tions in our own experience. The revelation becomes 
real as we apply it to our own lives, and as we make 
constant application of it to the problems of life. 
Christ is only, in that peculiar personal sense, real to 
us as He is King of our lives and we find Him in 
our own experience. If we would have the fullness of 
life we must know more and yet more about God, and 
to know more we must tirelessly, from day to day, 
from hour to hour, from moment to moment, always 
ask for knowledge of Him that we may receive it, seek 
for Him that we may find Him, knock constantly at 
the door of revelation that more and more it may be 
opened to us. 

One morning, when at a Chautauqua at a Lake 
Erie resort, I found myself unable to sleep and very 
early, while it was yet dark, I left my bed and went 
to walk on the shore of the lake. At first it was very 



I04 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

dark, but after a time the blackness of night shaded into 
the grey dawn, a little later I saw over the lake, at the 
horizon, the sun, coming up red out of the water, and 
the day was much brighter. At noon, when I took 
my boat, the day was very bright; the dancing sun- 
beams upon the water brought cheer to my heart. 
This change from the darkness of the night to the light 
of this noon-day was because of the sun that had risen 
to the meridian. 

I said to myself, '*This illustrates the unfolding 
revelation of the Infinite. In the beginning all was 
darkness, for the world did not know God. Then, 
little by little, in an imperfect sense, it is true, but 
nevertheless surely, men began to understand His 
character and His will for them. And as they drew 
nearer to the coming Son of Righteousness the world 
grew brighter in a truer knowledge of Him. And then 
Jesus Christ came into the world, and now His power 
is traveling toward the zenith of noon-day. It is true 
that at times the light of His gospel has been hidden 
by passing clouds, but nevertheless its power marched 
on in the world. I do not know when, but I know 
that some day we will no longer "see through a glass 
darkly/' but the revelation will be complete and the 
Son of Righteousness will reign supreme. Unlike the 
sun in the firmament, when the power of His gospel 
has reached its zenith it will not go down, but will 
shine on forever. 



PRAYER 

Let me say again that which I said in commencing 
my lecture on the Atonement. There are some truths 
that are so profound that they cannot be expressed 
through the medium of language ; there are some facts 
that rise to such a sublime heighth that we can com- 
prehend them only as we experience them. Prayer is 
one of these facts. You cannot define prayer so that 
others may thereby fathom its power. Prayer life 
cannot be expressed in such a way that those who do not 
pray can conceive its vital relation to life. We cannot 
build arguments that will drive men to pray, for prayer 
transcends logic. Men do not pray because they believe 
that it is a logical thing to do, but because deep in their 
lives they feel the need of that which prayer gives. In 
every soul there is an ineradicable desire to pray. 

For these reasons it is most difficult to either speak 
or write upon the subject of prayer. There is no 
thought of attempting, in this lecture, so impossible a 
task as delivering a defense of prayer or of building a 
logical argument for its need. It is hoped, however, 
that some may be helped to seek a deeper prayer 
life, and that there may be some difficulties cleared 
away for some who have not been receiving the bless- 
ings that should be theirs in this, the mightiest of all 
the functions of the soul. 

Prayer is the great essential of the Christian life. 
The other facts of Christian experience are made real 
to us through prayer and through prayer alone. We 
may give intellectual assent to many truths of the 
Christian faith, and understand somewhat of their 
vital relation to life, but they will be real to us only 



io6 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

as we make them ours through prayer. We under- 
stand many things about God which we learn from the 
Ups and from the pen of others, but we can only know 
God through prayer. Christ is our Christ only as we 
know Him through our prayer life. He becomes our 
Savior as we open our hearts to Him, and that is done 
through prayer. He is to us a strength and guide only 
as He is our companion, and this is made possible as we 
have fellowship with Him in prayer. 

Prayer is the open channel through which we reach 
God. It is through this channel that the divine life 
may enter into, and become a part of our lives, or 
better still, become our life. Man is a living Christian 
soul only as he prays. The soul that does not pray 
cannot live. 

Partly because we have tried to express in language 
that which transcends such expression, and partly 
because we are so apt to think that Christianity is a 
form rather than a vital soul life, we are apt to put 
the form of prayer in the place of vital prayer itself. 
We too often say our prayers rather than pray. And 
because the form of saying prayers so often takes the 
place of real prayer, our prayer life becomes a drag, 
and our souls become lean and starved for want of 
prayer, all because we do not understand that prayer 
is not mechanical. 

It is a tragedy that so many who are seriously striv- 
ing to do the will of God, and to live close to Him, 
are failing because they do not pray. And all the 
while they are failing to understand this because they 
are conscientiously observing the form of prayer and 
believing it to be prayer. There are many who do 
not understand prayer to be more than a mystical 
wireless telegraph by the use of which man, on earth, 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 107 

sends petitions to a God who is somewhere outside 
the universe; and the infinite ruler, way yonder on 
His throne, will hear the request thus carried to Him, 
and if it be pleasing to Him He will reach down into the 
world and change the natural order of events to com- 
ply with these requests, or so-called prayers. Thus 
prayer becomes nothing more than the reiteration of 
requests thrown out into space with a faith that some- 
how they will be carried to the throne of the Almighty, 
and our prayers become nothing more than endless 
petitionings for favor which in the very nature of the 
case will be a tiresome drag for anyone. Instead of 
prayer being an open channel through which life may 
come to our souls, it saps any vitality of spiritual life 
that we may have and leaves us exhausted from the 
eflfort. 

Somehow we have conceived the notion that God 
only works when He is requested to do so. We feel 
that for a church to receive greater spiritual life the 
membership must be constantly petitioning God for 
it, and that in due season, if we faint not, God will 
take account of the petitions and grant the desired 
favor. We forget that it is the constant desire of the 
Almighty to send, at all times, the greatest amount 
of spiritual blessing that any people will receive. 
Spiritual life can only come through prayer. But the 
reason that it comes only through prayer is not that 
God refuses to give that which He could give because 
He has not been sufficiently petitioned. He cannot 
give spiritual life without prayer, because it is through 
the channel of prayer that spiritual blessings reach us, 
and if the channel is not open we are out of touch with 
God and there is no medium through which the bless- 
ings can come. 



^ 



io8 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 



I say that it is a tragedy that so many who are seek- 
ing for a true spiritual life are allowing a mechanical 
saying of prayers to sap up their spiritual vitality. 
Instead of it bringing them joy, they find that prayer 
is a hard duty. If our prayer efforts are but a drag 
and bring us no joy it is certain that we have not yet 
learned the secret of true prayer. And it is meet that 
we request, as did the Apostles, ''Master, teach us 
to pray/' 

Harold Begbe, in his book ''Other Sheep,'' struck the 
keynote of this matter when he said, "Prayer is an 
aspiration of the immortal soul seeking communion 
with its Maker, not a request for benefits and 
advantages." 

That we may know how to pray we must know 
where to find God. It is a cold and dead sort of com- 
munion which comes only by crying out into space 
that which we have faith to believe will somehow be 
carried to the ear of Him who dwells outside the 
universe. If our idea of God is that of the ruler who 
sits upon His throne in the Heavens and touches the 
world only as He reaches into it from without to 
grant the requests of men, we will not be able to 
have any relationship with Him other than the wire- 
less telegraph sort of prayer. For God is, to us, 
where we find Him. 

Moses, after a long and soul-trying search covering 
a period of many years, a search which began in the 
schools of Egypt and continued through forty years 
of shepherding in the land of Midian ; a search in which 
Moses, had he but known, and if his soul had been in 
the right attitude, could have found God in a myriad 
of places, but he found Him at last while gazing upon 
a bush in the land of Midian. And because Moses saw 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 109 

God there the bush burned, and he took off his shoes, 
for he realized that he was on holy ground. 

Years later Moses was in great need of close com- 
munion with God, so he went away alone to talk with 
Him. For Moses, in those forty years of shepherding 
in Midian, had learned the lesson that is so essential to all 
of us in our devotional life, that for one to listen best 
for the voice of God they must go apart from the hurry- 
ing throng, from the things of the world that distract 
the mind, and be for the time alone with Him. When 
Moses needed in a particular way to talk with God 
he went alone to the top of Sinai. And, thereafter, to 
the Jew Sinai was the holy mount, for Moses had 
found God there. 

It was too much for men to comprehend easily that 
God is everywhere. When the temple was built at 
Jerusalem there was the Holy of Holies where it was 
expected that God would come. He was not to be 
found in the outer court, nor yet in the inner court, in 
fact only in the Holy of Holies; and although His 
presence filled the Holy of Holies, God Himself came 
and dwelt between the Cherubims that were over the 
ark of the covenant. They found Him there because 
it was there that they looked for Him. 

But God is everywhere. He was not only in one 
bush in the land of Midian, but He was in every bush, 
in every tree, in every hill and valley. But to Moses 
He was in one bush because it was in this bush that 
He found Him. All ground is holy ground, but the 
ground that was about the bush where Moses found 
God was to Moses holy ground for it was there that he 
had stood when he talked with God. God was on 
Sinai, but He was also on Mt. Gerizim, the holy mount 
of the Samaritan, and on every other mount, and in 



no THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

every valley as well, for every mount is a holy mount 
and every valley is a holy valley. But to Moses and 
the Jews Sinai was the holy mount, for they had found 
God there. The worshippers could have found God 
in the outer court of the temple, or in the streets of 
Jerusalem, or in the hills beyond Jerusalem as easily 
as the priests found Him in the Holy of Holies, for 
God is everywhere and every place is a holy place, 
but to the worshippers of Jehovah He was peculiarily 
in the Holy of Holies, for they found Him there. 

God is where we find Him. I once knew a good woman 
who always prayed, in our prayer meeting , a prayer 
that showed a great breadth of vision and a keen sym- 
pathy with God's work everywhere. When she had 
prayed for the Christian work abroad, and then for 
our nation, and afterward for the work in our own 
town, she would invariably close her petition by be- 
seeching the Almighty to bless all in '^divine presence.'' 
By that, we all understood, she meant those who were 
in the prayer meeting. Many of us feel as she did 
that when we come into a special prayer service or 
the place where we in a more formal way exercise the 
function of prayer we have come into the presence of 
God; and that when we have done with that service 
we go out of "divine presence." 

We come into our Sunday church service, or into 
our prayer meeting, and feel that we are coming into 
the presence of God, and we are, for to us He is there, 
for we find Him there. When the service is ended we 
too often feel that we go out of ''divine presence" and 
we will if we refuse to see Him elsewhere. 

At our family prayers or in our private devotions in 
the secret of our own chambers we feel that for the 
time that we go into the presence of God, and when 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST iii 

the hour of devotion is over we too often go out from 
His presence. It is right and proper that these times 
should be peculiarly sacred times when God seems 
very near to us. We all experience times when God 
seems wonderfully near even as Moses did in Midian 
or on Sinai. But we rob ourselves of the constant com- 
panionship of the Heavenly Father when we find Him 
only at these times. We should be in "divine presence" 
always and everywhere, not only in the church and the 
times of formal prayer when we in a special way com- 
mune with Him, but we ought always and everywhere 
to be in His presence. 

God may be, and if we will but let Him, He will be 
our companion at all places and at all times, on the 
street, at our work or at our play, in the field or the 
factory, in the office or store; in the midst of crowds 
or alone on our beds at night, anywhere and every- 
where, at all times, we may find Him if we but open 
our hearts to His indwelling. We should think of 
Him not as one afar off, but as being very near, not as 
a dweller in Heaven only, but one who fills the earth 
as well, one "in whom we live and move and have our 
being.'' 

I well remember of Bishop Thoburn standing before 
a Methodist conference and describing the difficulties 
of early missionary work in India. He said, "It would 
not have been possible if God had not been with us." 
Then, as if fearing that his hearers would think it 
only an empty pious phrase, he continued, "We were 
always conscious of His presence, as I am conscious 
of His presence now. For I am as sure that He is 
beside me here. And nearer than that, that He is 
within my heart, as I am sure that you men of the 
conference are sitting before me." 



TI2 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

Prayer is a constant fellowship with God, a fellow- 
ship in which we talk to Him, talk to Him in the 
formal way that we do in public prayer, talk to Him 
in the close confidential way that we do in our private 
devotional life. It is fellowship in which He talks to 
us. This side of our prayer life is much neglected; we 
talk to God, but we give Him no chance to talk to us ; 
we cry out our requests to Him, but we give Him no 
opportunity to answer. We do not listen for an 
answer. When we have our devotional times alone 
with Him we talk always to Him when much time 
should be spent in meditation, that He might talk to 
us. We have fellowship with God in that deep quiet 
way that does not need the expression of outward form 
or of language. True friends are often closest to each 
other when there is no word passed between them. 
True prayer does not always need the expression given 
in language, for much that the soul cries out to God 
is incapable of such expression. 

We are so taken up with the afifairs of our daily toil, 
of meeting life's problems as they come and bearing 
the burdens that fall upon us each day, or associating 
in a business or social relationship with our fellowmen 
that we cannot always be speaking to God, but we can 
always be conscious of His presence. And if we are 
always conscious of His presence we shall be armed 
so as to be victors over temptation, for He is near to 
supply strength for the necessary resistance. We will 
hardly show an ungodly temper or converse in a man- 
ner unbecoming to a Christian, nor will we be inclined 
to let our thoughts run in channels where Christians 
should not think if we are conscious that He is very 
near. We are weak and fall because we live so much 
of our time so far from Him; we would be strong in 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 113 

every temptation and rise above our many trials if we 
w^ould constantly have fellov^ship w^ith Him. And it 
is by this fellowship that we ''pray without ceasing." 

Somewhere I have heard of a man whose life was con- 
sistently Christlike, and yet he was seldom known to 
make a formal prayer. One day a friend called at his 
office during the rush hours that directly precede the 
close of the day's business, and was asked to wait a 
little in an inner office. From his seat there he could 
hear the man who was often criticised for saying so few 
prayers, as he met some of the most trying business 
situations in a calm and kindly spirit that could hardly 
have been manifested with one having a less Christian 
spirit. After the last caller had gone the man who 
waited in the inner office heard his friend, as he closed 
his desk for the night, say quietly, as if to a friend by 
his side, ''Master, we're on the same blessed terms as 
ever." That was all, he was not on his knees for a 
formal prayer, it was all so very simple that many would 
have denied that it was a prayer, but that man had the 
true secret of prayer, "Master, we're on the same 
blessed terms as ever." The Master a constant com- 
panion through all the trying situations of the day, he 
had fellowship with Christ, and that is prayer. 

The child awakes in the night, it is dark, the great 
unknown is before it, its little heart beats wildly in 
fright, it opens its mouth to cry, it reaches out its arms 
and then its hand touches its mother's face. She takes 
the little hand in her own and the little heart comes 
back to its normal beat, its cry dies unheard, the fear is 
gone and the child sleeps for its mother is there. We 
waken to the realization of the world of sin all about us. 
Who are we that we can meet and overcome all life's 
trials, and hardships, all its temptations and sorrows? 



114 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

We cry out with the fear of it all; then we reach into 
the broader and higher life and our hand is clasped in 
the hand of God and we rise above all the conflicts of 
the world for God is there. That is prayer. 

The soul that does not pray cannot live. But the soul 
that prays has an abundance of life in the midst of the 
greatest difficulties. To talk with God and God with 
us, to have fellowship with God everywhere and at all 
times, that is prayer. 

''Speak to Him, for He heareth. 

And spirit with spirit can meet; 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer 

Than hands or feet.'' 



THINGS OF WHICH WE ARE CERTAIN 

The Christian church has grounds for a feeUng of 
alarm to-day when we consider the large number who 
are forsaking the Christian faith, either being lured 
away by some religious fad such as Theosophy, New 
Thought, Christian Science and the like, or else their 
faith is destroyed by the onslaught of doubt. It is 
heart-breaking to think of the hundreds of young folk, 
who, because of doubts that are born with the new 
mental awakening which comes with their first years at 
college, lose their Christian faith, and finding nothing 
to take its place, drift away from all religious life. 

We have been explaining these losses by blaming them 
to the fickleness and superficiality of those who forsake 
the Christian camp for that of some one of the many 
preset-day religious fads and we have been accusing 
the colleges of robbing our young folk of their faith by 
destructive and unorthodox teaching. 

There are certain individual cases where these rea- 
sons may explain : there are folk who are so unstable 
as to be susceptible to the fascination of every false 
doctrine, and the colleges do not always deal with the 
young people as wisely as they ought concerning these 
matters. But in the main neither of these explanations 
explain ; Christianity is losing some strong-minded and 
educated people to the non-Christian cults, and our col- 
leges, especially the denominational colleges, have fac- 
ulties composed of earnest and consecrated men and 
women. We must go deeper than either of these rea- 
sons to find an explanation. 

In a large part the fault lies in the foundation upon 
which so many build their faith. In many cases where 



Ii6 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

the superstructure of faith has been good, the faith has 
been wrecked because the foundations were not deep 
and firm. 

Let me apply the illustration that the Master used at 
the close of His Sermon on the Mount, when He said, 
''Therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings of mine 
and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which 
built his house upon a rock : and the rain descended, and 
the floods came, and the wind blew and beat upon that 
house; and it fell not for it was founded upon a rock." 

''And everyone that heareth these sayings of mine and 
doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, 
which built his house upon the sand: and the rain de- 
scended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and 
beat upon that house, and it fell : and great was the fall 
of it." 

It was not because of a weakness in the house that it 
could not withstand the storm; undoubtedly the house 
that was built upon the sand was as strong as the one 
that was built on the rock. The weakness was in the 
foundation. So it is with many in their Christian faith 
It is firm as to superstructure but, like the house of the 
foolish man, it is built upon sand. So when the rain 
of doubt descends, and the floods of false religions come, 
and the winds of skepticism blow and beat upon this 
house of faith it will fall : because it was built upon the 
sand. 

If the foundations that the church had laid for the 
superstructure of faith had been rock the onslaught of 
such agnostics as Robert Ingersoll would not have 
weakened and destroyed the faith of many in the way 
that it did. I am inclined to believe that the church 
should be thankful for such men as Ingersoll, not be- 
cause of the destruction that they accomplish, but be- 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 117 

cause after the storm is over we may discover what part 
of our foundation has been sand. 

That the foundation may be rock our faith must be 
built upon facts about which we can have no doubt, 
things of which we are absolutely certain. There are 
many things that we think that we believe but about 
which there is a large degree of uncertainty. We may 
not know that we are not positively certain concerning 
these things for the reason that we have always accepted 
them without much thought and with very little ques- 
tioning. But when, for some reason, we are called upon 
to give proof to support these beliefs, or we hear them 
assailed and are thus inspired to investigate them in a 
way that we have not done heretofore, we find that not 
only are we far from being as positive about them as 
we had thought, but that we can never be sure that they 
are facts. There are some things that have to do with 
religion of which we never can be absolutely sure. We 
may passively believe or disbelieve them, but whether 
we feel that we believe them or not they are exceedingly 
poor foundation for the superstructure of faith. For 
some time when we are feeling exceptionally sure in our 
Christian hope some one will assail that which we have 
made the foundation of our faith and we will find 
that they have planted doubts in our minds of which 
we cannot rid ourselves because we cannot be absolutely 
certain concerning our foundation. It will not be long^ 
then, until we find that our faith is weakening and in 
danger of falling under the pressure of the storm. All 
this because we have builded upon the sand. 

If the superstructure of our faith is to be built upon 
a foundation that makes it impregnable to the assaults 
of doubt and the storms of skepticism it must be upon 
the rock of things of which we are certain, things that 



ii8 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

we know beyond the peradventure of a doubt. We have 
built too largely on sand in the days that are gone and 
it is for this reason that the faith of so many have been 
easily destroyed. 

Let me point out certain sands upon which we have 
been building in the past, that those who have been using 
them for a foundation may shift to surer ground. I do 
not mean to say that these things are false because they 
are sand for foundation, they may or may not be true, 
but they are sand because at best they are speculation and 
not things that we can positively know. 

There are those who build their faith upon the prop- 
osition that the Bible is the verbally inspired word of 
God, that God had made men His stenographers to write 
revelation to His dictation, that every word of the 
Scripture is infallibly correct having come at the direct 
dictation of the infinite mind. Therefore, if it can be 
proved that in any instance the Scriptures are in error, 
that in their history, or geology or their astronomy they 
are in any case wrong, then according to the logic of 
those who base their faith upon the theory of verbal 
inspiration, the whole Bible must fall and their faith will 
be swept away. 

Whether the theory of verbal inspiration is true or 
not it is a dangerous proposition upon which to build 
one's faith, for it will mean that if any doubt can be 
raised as to the authenticity of any part of the Scrip- 
tures the whole faith will be wrecked. The book of 
Revelation tells of an angel descending upon the "four 
corners of the earth.'' Now if the Angel descended 
upon the four corners of the earth, the earth must have 
four corners ; if it has corners it cannot be round. This 
being true, if the Bible stands and falls with each in- 
tegral part we are driven to one of two conclusions; 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 119 

either the Copernican theory is wrong, and all the pres- 
ent-day scientific theories of the universe are wrong, 
and we must turn back centuries and call the world 
square again, or else we must throw over the Bible, and 
our faith will be destroyed. Many a man has lost his 
faith because of just this sort of an argument, having 
believed that the Christian faith was built upon the 
theory of verbal inspiration. 

I hear folk say that their faith stands or falls with 
the story of Adam or of Jonah and the whale. No 
matter what I may believe concerning these stories, I 
should dislike to make them the foundation of my 
Christian faith, for we cannot be really sure one way 
or the other. Stop a minute and think; if you were 
called upon to prove to a jury that the story of Adam 
as the first man was literally authentic, or that the 
story of Jonah and the whale is the historic record of 
that which actually took place, how would you go 
about it? But, you say, ''I know.'' How do you 
know? You cannot experience it. When the truth is 
told no one knows, for there is no way of knowing. 
Therefore, whether your conception of these things is 
right or wrong, it is an unsound foundation, for it is 
that about which we cannot be certain. And some- 
one may be able, as Ingersoll did with many in the 
past, to creat a doubt in your mind which will of neces- 
sity weaken your faith. 

There are some who build their faith upon a belief 
in miracles. I judge that most all Christians believe 
in miracles, but nevertheless such a belief is sand for 
foundation, for after all wc cannot positively prove 
that some things we have called miracles have not been 
the workings of natural law. If we base our faith upon 
belief in miracles and some one produces arguments 



120 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

that tend to prove that the records of many of the so- 
called miracles of the Bible are only myths, that were 
introduced into the gospels long after the authors were 
dead, that the healing of the sick was but the working 
of the principles that are today embodied in psycho- 
therapy, that the raising of the dead was accomplished 
by the use of a natural law yet to be discovered, then, 
if our faith is based on miracles it will be weakened or 
destroyed. It would be extremely difficult to produce 
sufficient evidence to positively prove that the miracles 
recorded in the Bible were authentic, and we cannot be 
sure by experience, so no matter how plausible the 
arguments that are brought forward to support a 
belief in miracles we cannot be absolutely sure. 

It is, therefore, wise to find some other foundation 
for our faith, so that if our conviction concerning 
miracles is ever weakened the superstructure of faith 
will remain as firm as ever. A careful study of the life 
of Christ will show that He did not perform miracles 
to establish authority upon which He might build His 
Kingdom, He never oflfered the fact that He could heal 
the sick and raise the dead as proof of His divine 
mission. We find that He performed miracles for the 
same reason that He told parables, to illustrate and 
enforce certain truths, or else because of the compas- 
sion of His own heart. He healed the sick because of 
great passion for those who suflFered, He fed the 
multitude, not to show His power, hvtt because they 
were hungry and had nothing to eat. 

Such propositions as these of verbal inspiration and 
miracles may or may not be true, but they are unsound 
as foundation for our faith, for they are things about 
which there is no absolute assurance. Our faith should 
be founded upon the rock of certainty, upon those 
things that we are positive that we know. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 121 

I know of only one absolutely safe foundation for 
our faith, that is our own experience. Bishop F. J. 
McConnel has given me the following idea and illustra- 
tion. We accept everything in life, aside from our 
religion, on the law of demand and supply. By that I 
mean that we experience certain demands and accept as 
real and essential that which best supplies these demands. 
To illustrate, our experience teaches us that our bodies 
demand food, and we have found that meat, fruit, and 
vegetables supply this demand. Therefore, we do not 
stop to argue about the necessity of food to life, but 
accept that which supplies so essential a demand. If 
some one would come to us with an argument to prove 
that food was unnecessary and that we would be as 
strong without it as we are with it, we might scruti- 
nize the logic of the argument and find it flawless. 
We might be convinced from the standpoint of logic 
that food was never a necessity. But when meal time 
comes we feel the immediate need of food, and food 
supplies that need and we, therefore, cast theory to the 
wind and eat. 

Mrs. Eddy said in an early edition of Science and 
Health that food was not a necessity of life, but she 
omitted the contention from the subsequent editions 
because the public demanded to know why it was that 
she ate three meals every day. 

If we should desire to thoroughly test the argument 
against food, and should refuse to eat we would find 
that each day we would grow weaker, and that we 
would continually lose flesh and it would not be long 
until we would be near death. When once more we 
would answer the call of hunger we would find our 
strength and our flesh returning, and the vigor of life 
would come flooding back. Although we might yet 



122 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

be unable to find any flaw in the logic that inspired us 
to give up food, the argument is superseded by experi- 
ence. We know that our bodies demand food, and 
that certain meats, vegetables and fruits supply the de- 
mand ; therefore, we eat them. 

We are continually casting aside our theories to 
accept that which is offered by experience. We recog- 
nize that in the realm of the material, experience is 
the final authority. If this be so in the other things 
in life should experience not also be the final authority 
in matters of religion? If we make experience the 
final authority in matters of religion, and the founda- 
tion upon which the superstructure of our faith is 
builded, we shall be proof against all assaults of doubt 
and skepticism. Moreover, it will make the facts of 
religious life of much greater value to us for they will 
be ours in a much more personal way than when we 
accept our faith from some mechanically constructed 
abstract argument. Experience is, above all else, 
vitally personal, and everything that it brings us will, 
in the very nature of the case, be a very personal pos- 
session. That which we experience we will not doubt. 
We may be skeptical about that which others profess 
to have experienced, and no matter how much faith 
we have in the conclusions of logic, there are times 
when we are very slow to accept them as authoritative. 
But we are always very certain about the things that 
we ourselves experience. Therefore, if we build the 
essentials of our religious faith upon the foundations 
of experience neither the force of the skeptic's logic, or 
the doubts that arise concerning non-essentials can 
weaken our faith. 

Personally — and in this matter no one can speak in 
a general way, for we cannot know authoritatively 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 123 

about the experience of others, nor of the creeds that 
they have built from their experience. But for himself 
each man may speak with great assurance concerning 
his own experience — personally, I am very certain of 
some things ; not because I have been brought to them 
by logic, but because my life made certain demands 
and I have found that these things supplied that de- 
mand. These things of which I am certain supply the 
foundation of my religious faith ; they constitute my 
creed. My creed is not unlike that of thousands of 
others, it is, nevertheless, my own for it is born out of 
my own experience. 

First. / Believe in God. No man can be argued to 
God, for God transcends logic. Certain philosophic 
arguments may help one to see their need of God and 
do something to lead them toward Him. Theistic 
philosophy has its place, but it is not saving the world. 
I believe the arguments of Theism, largely, because 
they bear out that which I have already discovered in 
my experience. 

I believe in God because I feel a very great need of 
Him. There is nowhere for me to rest either mind or 
soul without God. Mentally I battle with the problems 
of the universe and grow very tired of the battle, I 
seem to be getting nowhere. Then I posit God as the 
answer to all these problems, such as the problems of 
creation, of life and growth. I do not understand the 
how of many of these things, that comes little by little 
through a hard mental struggle, much of it I will never 
understand here, but meanwhile I rest in the assurance 
that it is so, for some way God is very satisfying as a 
final explanation and in Him I can mentally rest. 

Without God I find no rest for my soul. The pain 
and sorrow, the weight of sin, the great struggle in 



124 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

a Godless world would all be too heavy a load to 
bear. My soul grows sick and tired, I must find 
strength and rest in some higher power; no blind force, 
no impersonal intellect will satisfy. I can find rest 
and find strength only in a personal God. I find that 
above all else I need such a God as the Christian 
Father-God, and since He supplies the great soul need, 
/ believe in God. The atheist may present his argu- 
ments, he may show, after his fashion, that there is no 
need for a God in the world, and he may demonstrate 
by faultless logic, if he can, that there is no God. The 
agnostic may prove to me, as far as argument can 
prove, that if there is a God I cannot know Him, but 
I w^ill still say that I believe in God. For I have felt 
the overwhelming need of Him and have found that 
He supplies that need. Therefore upon the authority 
of my own experience, all else notwithstanding, I be- 
lieve in God. 

/ believe in Jesus Christ. I believe in Him because 
I must have Him that I may have God, and I must 
have God to live. John spoke truly when he said, "No 
man hath seen God at any time, but the only begotten 
who is in the bosom of the Father He hath revealed 
Him unto us." When we stop to think we realize that 
the only God we know is the God that Christ revealed 
to us. The God that I need is not the God of the He- 
brews, but the God of Christ. Take away Christ and 
you rob me of God ; give me Christ and in the truest 
sense I possess God. I need a mediator to reveal God 
to me, and Christ fills that need, I, therefore, believe 
in Christ. The skeptic may bring every argument that 
he can conceive to prove that Christ is not what the 
Christians think Him to be. If they can they may 
show me that the records of His life are not authentic. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 125 

they may make Him out to be no more than man, and 
bring forth their metaphysics to prove that as a divine 
revelation of God He was impossible. I may be un- 
able to answer their arguments, but I will still say that 
I believe in Christ, the divine Christ who is a revela- 
tion of God. For I have felt a supreme need of Him 
and have found in experience that He alone supplies 
that need. 

/ believe in the Bible. No literary or other argu- 
ment could ever bring me to the place where I would 
have so implicit a faith in the Bible, as a book con- 
taining divine revelation, that it could not be de- 
stroyed, or at least greatly weakened by the fire from 
the guns of the skeptics. I defy any skeptic to weaken 
my faith in the Bible to-day. Let them do their ut- 
most to destroy it, let them attempt to prove whatever 
they wish as far as my own faith is concerned. Let 
them bring argument, unanswerable other than from 
experience, to prove that it is no more divine revelation 
than the dramas of Shakespeare ; let them expose it 
as a legend or mythology, and I will yet say with 
great assurance I believe in the Bible as the book that 
contains God's revelation to men. I need the record 
that will bring me to Jesus Christ, and will show the 
manner in which God has been revealing Himself 
through the ages; and without the record of the final 
revelation that came through Christ I would not know 
either the Father or the Son. I must have this record, 
and the Bible gives it to me. Thus I find that the 
Bible, and the Bible alone, fills a vital need of my life. 
Therefore, in spite of any possible mistakes in the 
Scriptures or any weakness that may be found in its 
revelation, I know its worth from experience and 
affirm my belief in the Bible. 



126 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. The objections 
that have been raised by some who base their religious 
faith upon their metaphysics, against evangelical 
Christianity are aimed chiefly against the doctrine of 
forgiveness of sin. No man, however, who knows 
what it means to have pardon from his sins and the 
life of God again in his soul will need any metaphysical 
argument to prove to him that a man's sins can he 
forgiven. 

There is no one but has felt that which the psalmist 
did when he cried, "Who shall deliver me from this 
bond of death?'' And there are thousands that can 
testify as did the psalmist, "This poor man cried and 
the Lord heard him and delivered him out of all his 
troubles." Were all logic and every system of philos- 
ophy contrary, I would still believe in the forgiveness 
of sin, for I have sinned and felt keenly the need of 
forgiveness and then I have known what it meant to 
have my sins forgiven. Therefore I am certain, there 
can be no doubt — I believe in the forgiveness of sin. 

/ believe in the efficacy of prayer. I know very little 
of the philosophy of prayer. I know of no argument 
that will lead a man to pray. I have not been able to 
answer many of the objections that have been raised 
against prayer. But this I do know, that when I do not 
pray I have no spiritual life, when I neglect my prayer 
life, I drift away from God. I may attend church and 
listen to sermons, I may read my Bible and do good 
to my fellow-men, and yet I find myself constantly 
drifting farther away from God. When I pray I live 
spiritually, I feel the presence of God, I am more 
efficient in my labors for Him. 

I am in the valley of the shadow, sorrow weighs 
heavy upon my heart, I am tired and discouraged, I 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 127 

read the promises of comfort and seek for succor 
everywhere, but I do not pray. I find that the sorrow 
continually weighs heavier and the discouragement 
leads to despair. I pray, and behold peace comes and 
relieves the pain of the sorrow, and the Father through 
the channel of prayer, sends courage to give victory 
over the discouragement. We pray because we in- 
stinctively feel the need of what prayer gives us. No 
man can convince me that there is no efficacy in 
prayer, for I know that there is. 

/ believe in the Resurrection of the dead. I am fa- 
miliar with most of the arguments for immortality, and 
I am not sure that, if there was nothing more, they 
would convince me that there was life beyond the grave. 
I am quite certain that I would not be sure that I 
would live eternally because there is life in the appar- 
ently dead cocoon. Nor am I sure that I would be 
without doubt of immortality because Christ rose from 
the tomb. These and other arguments may be satisfying 
to some, but I doubt if they would be to me if I had 
no other assurance. I believe them because they confirm 
that which I already feel sure about. 

The great question of all people has been, "If a man 
die shall he live again?'' And the heart of man has 
always craved an affirmative answer. The heart of man 
questions: "If a man die will he live again as himself, 
or will his life take on some other form or be lost in the 
life of the infinite.'' Again the heart craves for the 
answer. If a man die he will live again as himself ; per- 
sonality is eternal. Our hearts question, "when we step 
from this life into that other will our friends be familiar 
to us?" And with the longing comes the desire for the 
assurance that we will know our loved ones in that 
broader life. Because our hearts so long for this as- 



128 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

surance, and because the Christian revelation concerning 
these matters is so satisfactory to our hungry hearts 
I am very certain that the Christian revelation in this 
regard is true. Therefore, because this assurance satis- 
fies so well the longing of the soul I believe that if a 
man die he will live again as himself and that we will 
know each other in that life. 

Thus for myself, from my own experience I have 
built this creed: 

I believe in God. 

I beHeve in Jesus Christ. 

I believe in the Bible. 

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. 

I believe in the efficacy of prayer. 

I believe in eternal life. 

Do not build your faith upon the sands of the things 
of which you are uncertain, for the winds of doubt and 
skepticism will blow and the house will fall. Rather 
build your faith upon the rock of your own experience, 
of the things of which you are certain, and no power in 
earth or hell can overthrow it. 



THE VICTORIOUS KINGDOM 

No man can be sure of the future of the Kingdoms 
of this earth. Those that are strong to-day may be weak 
to-morrow. The nation that to-day is flushed with vic- 
tory, to-morrow may be humiHated in defeat. Men 
sacrifice themselves for a human cause in confidence that 
it will ultimately conquer, only to see it meet ignominous 
defeat. At best no kingdom of earth is permanently 
victorious; a nation becomes strong and takes the front 
rank among nations only to be overthrown in the 
changing order. We have a record of the rise and also 
the fall of the Roman Empire. Greece and Athens were 
among chief of cities of their time, Constantinople was 
once the seat of a mighty and victorious empire, but 
to-day their glory is in the dust. In the centuries that 
are to come our posterity will read of *'The Rise and 
Fair' of the British Kingdom and of the American Re- 
public ; it is inevitable in the changing order. Kingdoms; 
of the world are not eternal, they come and go, they 
rise and fall. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is diflferent; when other 
kingdoms wane and the day of their glory is past the 
Kingdom of Heaven will be reigning supreme. The 
kingdoms of earth rise to their zenith and then sink to 
oblivion, but the Kingdom of Heaven requires eternity 
to attain its zenith and it cannot be defeated. Those 
who fight under the banner of the cross are battling for 
a winning cause where there can be no doubt as to the 
ultimate outcome. 

The conflict betv/een the Kin.cdom of Heaven and the 
powers of evil is a conflict which takes place on this 
earth, and the victories of The Kingdom will be part 



130 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

of the programme of this Hfe as well as of the life to 
come. Jesus taught us to pray, 'Thy Kingdom come, 
Thy will be done in earth as it is in Heaven." John, on 
Patmos, saw a vision of *'the holy city, New Jerusalem, 
coming down from God out of Heaven.'' All this 
teaches us to expect to see the victory of The Kingdom 
in this world. 

There are those who think that they read in prophecy 
that The Kingdom of Christ will decline rather than 
advance in the earth. I am not greatly interested in 
any one's interpretation of prophecy, so called, for I 
am inclined to believe that it is not for us '*to know the 
times and the seasons." I believe that experience will 
bear me out in this; for if God's plan is to reveal the 
future to men He would certainly make it plain enough 
that at least two scholars might agree as to its meaning. 
As it is, no two who are original in their research 
reach a like conclusion concerning the divine plan for 
the future. I am, therefore, distrustful of the divine 
origin of any system of, so called, prophecy. And I 
emphatically disagree with the theory that the desired 
end will have been reached, and that Christ will take 
tip a triumphant reign when the world has grown much 
worse. If, however, I did believe that this was the 
divine plan I would withdraw from the church and con- 
nect myself with some gambling, whiskey or libertine 
enterprise that I might do my part toward bringing in 
the reign of Christ. 

It is a sick faith that believes that The Kingdom of 
Christ is waning in the earth, and a sadly distorted 
vision that makes the gospel successful by failing in the 
accomplishment of that which it teaches should be 
brought to pass. 

There have always been a multitude of religious pessi- 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 131 

mists that have insisted that the world was constantly 
growing worse and that faith was on the decline. To 
some folk the golden age is always in the past. Some 
time ago I discovered a book that was published in the 
year 1856, the year of that wonderful religious awaken- 
ing that has marked a mighty spiritual advance in this 
country. This book, written in the midst of this great 
awakening, contained a great wail of pessimism, ''the 
world is growing worse and worse,'' said the author, 
''Oh, for the faith of our fathers!'' The religious pes- 
simist to-day cries that the world is getting worse, "Oh, 
for the spirit of 1856!" 

The author of the book of Ecclesiastes spoke as if 
to this class of churchmen when he said, "Say not thou, 
what is the cause that the former days were better than 
these? for thou hast not enquired wisely concerning 
this." 

No one who is familiar with history can believe that 
the world is constantly growing worse. Surely the 
world's governments are better than they were when 
men believed in the divine right of kings. To-day the 
most unenlightened nation in the world grants more 
liberty and listens more to the voice of the people than 
did the most enlightened nations not many centuries ago. 
There has not been a period in the world's history when 
the great body of the people were as largely educated as 
they are at the present time. 

The world is certainly progressing morally. The facts 
concerning the morals of Greece and Rome in their 
palmiest days, the stories of the sanctioned immoralties 
of the courts of the greatest monarchs of the earth and 
often of the Papal court itself are too indecent for pub- 
lication. Although there are frightful moral lapses in 
high places to-day these irnmoralities are not sanctioned 
social practices of the highest tribunals of the earth. 



132 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

It is true that the world is full of social and economic 
injustice, but a careful study of conditions of the past 
will show us that the conditions of the present are su- 
perior to those of almost any other period. In the past 
the world was asleep to the great social injustices, there 
was no voice raised against them, but now we are doing 
our utmost to expunge them from the earth. 

There never was a time more promising in its out- 
look for religious liberty. The religious pessimist should 
read again of the crimes of the Dark Ages and remem- 
ber that they were committed in the name of religion, 
they should remember that in times past it was a com- 
mon practice to send men to the rack and torture them 
in a way that we would not dare to torture any man 
for the most despicable of crimes to-day, to compel them 
to conform to the tyrannical demands of the church 
This is the first age when we can see the dawn of real 
religious liberty. We cannot read history and deny that 
the world is growing better. 

We err in thinking that the world is growing more 
wicked because our vision is too limited. I had in my 
parish at one time a man nearly eighty years old who 
had never been fifty miles away from his birthplace. 
I often talked with him of other parts of the country, 
and I found that he judged every other place by the 
part of country where he had spent his life. I spent a 
week in camp along a mountain stream, which ran 
through a gully, the mountains rising abruptly on both 
sides, and the only view that we had was of these tower- 
ing hills that rose immediately from the banks of the 
stream. Before the week was ended I some way felt 
that the world had grown very small, and I am sure 
that had I spent a few years living there between those 
hills my conception of much in the outer world would 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 133 

have become as narrow as that valley. If I had been 
born there and lived there always I would have felt 
that all the world was as circumscribed. 

In our religious outlook we are apt to judge the world 
by our own community, and the advancement of The 
Kingdom by the advancement of our local church or- 
ganization. We are too much inclined to think of the 
past by the things that we can remember rather than 
by the records of history. We need to climb to the top 
of the mount and take a survey of the whole country. 
If you will do this you will be surprised to see the 
progress that we have made. We should look back 
over the span of the whole Christian era, and then 
should scrutinize the work on the mission fields, and 
study the practical effect of the gospel on society that 
we may realize just how far we have come. 

It may be that in many ways the organic church is 
losing but we should consider how the spirit of brother- 
hood and the spirit of service is leavening the whole 
lump of society. Nations are being brought closer to- 
gether, and the day of which the angels sang on the 
first Christmas morning, when there would be "Peace 
on earth and good will among men'' is nearer at hand 
than it has ever been before. Surely this is the spirit of 
the Christ at work in the world. 

I recognize the fact that we are losing some battles; 
many who pretend to be working for the world's better- 
ment are selfish in their motives; the church is losing 
because of its materialistic spirit. I know that many in 
high places in the earth are unjust, that the strong stiTl 
oppress the weak, and men still live very much for 
themselves; the millennium is not here, but it is comin^r. 
Where we are losing in some things we are gaining in 
others. 



134 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

Some churchmen are telling us that we are not hav- 
ing the revivals that we used to have, and that folk are 
not as zealous in their religious life as they were in the 
days of our fathers. I am afraid that much of what 
they say is true, the church must suffer for its sins. 
But that does not mean that the spirit of Christ is not 
advancing in the world. Things looked very dark with- 
in the church before the advent of the great German 
monk, Martin Luther. The church was far from being 
spiritually alive when the Wesleys organized the Holy 
Club at Oxford. But the terrible spiritual darkness of 
those days was in reality birth pains, and from that 
travail was born the movements that so mightily ad- 
vanced The Kingdom in the earth. It seems now that 
there will be, in the not far distant future, a new move- 
ment toward a more vital religious life that will make the 
church a greater spiritual power than it has ever been. 

All of the change in the church is not a sign of retro- 
grade, much of it is an evidence of growth. Growth 
always means change, stagnation is death. Those who 
are constantly crying for ''the good old days'' forget 
that the world moves forward, and that everything that 
grows changes form. Tennyson put a great truth into 
the mouth of King Arthur, when, after ''that last weird 
battle of the west,'' the great king was drifting, in the 
barge with the three queens, out to sea. And Sir Bedi- 
vere, crying out because the round table, that was "an 
image of a mighty world" was to be no more; then 
Arthur made answer from the barge, 

"The old order changeth, yielding place to the new, 
God fulfills Himself in many ways, 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 135 

A custom that was good in its day and met the de- 
mands of its time may be very ineffective now because 
it is out of harmony with the changed order. Moreover, 
those who are always seeking opportunity to ply an 
evil trade learn how they can corrupt a custom that was 
an instrument of righteousness in times past. So that 
that which yesterday was a power for good may to-day 
be a tool for knaves. That which in the days that are 
gone was an instrument by which the world was made 
better is now used to corrupt it. God, however, is not 
bound by one form in His work. He has more than 
one instrument by which He can accomplish His ends. 
When the old becomes ineffective He ordains the use 
of the new. Because we saw God in the old order does 
not signify that He is not also working through the 
new. *'The old order changeth giving place to new — 
God fulfills Himself in many ways." 

There is no enemy strong enough to defeat the King- 
dom of Christ. We may lose battles, we may have many 
traitors in our camp, thousands may grow weary and 
desert, we may fight well with one implement of war- 
fare to-day only to find it ineffective to-morrow, so we 
must drop it as a relic of the old order and take a new 
and more effective weapon, but always the Kingdom of 
Christ is moving on to victory. It will win; it cannot 
fail. 

As the Kingdom of Christ will ultimately be victori- 
ous in the world, it will be victorious over the world in 
the heart of every individual who will in a true sense 
become a citizen. It will give victory over the sorrows 
of the world, over the failure and disappointments of 
earth, over the sins that so constantly beset us. 

Paul was not a thoughtless optimist when he said, 
''All things work together for good to them that love 



136 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

God." This is the divine philosophy of Christ's King- 
dom, ^vlan may lose in the things of the world, and if 
he is not a citizen of The Kingdom the loss to him will 
be defeat, but if he does have citizenship in The King- 
dom, by the plan of the Infinite the loss is turned into 
victory. A man may lose his money and absolutely fail 
in business and when it is all over find that he has re- 
ceived great spiritual blessing through the loss. As the 
spiritual is worth infinitely more than the material he 
gains in the loss. 

To the one without the Christian hope, sorrow can 
bring nothing but despair. I cannot see how those out 
of the Kingdom of Christ could say that their sorrow 
was gain, but the divine law is such that, to the Chris- 
tian, out of the travail of great sorrow is born great 
spiritual light and life that shall mean much as in- 
finite riches, not only to the one that knew the sorrow, 
but to the world as it is benefited by the character that 
comes as the outgrowth of the refining power of sorrow. 
In many ways success in this life means a failure in 
the spiritual. Many a man has lost his vision of God 
because he became rich and powerful, because he suc- 
ceeded too well in temporal things. Failure in the realm 
of the temporal very often means success in the spiritual. 
There is a peculiar depth of truth in that great hymn 
of Dr. Matheson, the blind Scotch preacher, especially 
when we understand that it was written after disappoint- 
ment in love. Out of the failure of his love and from 
the great affliction of his blindness he was inspired to 
write, 

"O, Love that will not let me go, 
I rest my weary soul in Thee ; 
I give Thee back the life I owe, 
That in Thine ocean's depths its flow 
May richer, fuller, be. 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 137 

O, Joy that seekest me through pain, 
I cannot close my heart to Thee ; 
I trace the rainbow through the rain, 
And feel the promise is not vain 
That morn shall tearless be.'' 

That which seems failure, and that which is failure 
in the eyes of the world, by the law of divine compensa- 
tion is turned into victory for those who are citizens of 
Christ's Kingdom. 

If one succeeds in the spiritual he cannot fail, for 
that which is ultimately worth while is not that which 
will pass away but that which remains, not the things 
that are temporal but the things that are eternal. 

The late Dr. Borden Parker Bowne in his last public 
address, speaking to a body of theological students, said : 
^'We are going to be through this life before very long. 
The longest life is short when it is over; any time is 
short when it is done. The gates of time will swing 
to behind you before long. They will swing to behind 
some of us soon, but behind all of us before long. And 
then the important thing will not be what rank we held, 
or anything of that sort — not what men thought of us, 
but what He thought of us, and whether we were built 
into His Kingdom. And if, at the end of it all, we 
emerge from life's work and discipline, crowned souls, 
at home anywhere in God's universe, life will be a 
success." 

If he had been talking to busines men, instead of 
theological students, he would have said, "The great 
question will not be how much money you have made 
or have you been a business success? or if it had been 
to the politician, the great question will not be what 
offices have you held, or did you receive the applause 



138 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 

of the multitude/' For these that, in the estimate of 
the world are the most to be desired are not the things 
that in the end constitute the true success in life. Real 
success has to do with that which is infinitely higher. 

Jesus said, ''This is life eternal, that they may know 
Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou 
hast sent/' And if we know God and Christ, no matter 
how we may fail in the things that belong to the temporal 
life, we will not have failed, for we will have succeeded 
in the life which is found through the Kingdom that 
cannot fail, the Kingdom that is within you. 

Christ's Kingdom brings victory to every citizen, it 
will not fail in the earth for it is The Kingdom vie- 
torious. God speed the day when ''every knee shall bow 
and every tongue confess,'' and "the kingdoms of this 
world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of 
His Christ." 



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